Amazon Goes The Alibaba Way To Drive Sales Growth

Amazon.com, Inc AMZN aims to tap the QVC-style livestream shopping market taking a leaf out of Alibaba Group Holding Limited BABA and TikTok to revive flagging online sales, the Financial Times reports.

Amazon ramped up investment in Amazon Live, a platform it launched in 2019 to grab a slice of a growing market touted as the future of shopping by social media platforms.

Amazon hosted at least four events to attract more influencers to its platform, including a flashy retreat at a Mexican beach resort in 2022. 

Also Read: Here's How Alibaba And Others Fared In China's June Shopping Extravaganza

Amazon doled generous bonuses to the top influencers to stream live on Amazon, exclusively betting on China's success in the segment. 

China's sales through livestreams will likely surpass $400 billion in 2022, representing 15% of China's all e-commerce sales, up from 3.5% just three years ago, FT wrote. TikTok parent ByteDance's sales on Chinese sister app Douyin more than tripled year on year, selling more than 10 billion products.

Amazon aims to establish itself as the primary destination for live online shopping, beating Alphabet Inc GOOG GOOGL YouTube, Meta Platforms Inc META Instagram, TikTok, and a host of smaller start-ups backed by prominent venture capital firms. 

Amazon Live executive Wayne Purboo saw livestream shopping as the future of retail. "We know that video is a driving force in customer purchases. We know that when customers are on Amazon, they are already in shopping mode. So we wanted to lean into that," he added. 

As the largest e-commerce player, Amazon has a strong hand, said Gaz Alushi, from social media creator commerce agency Whalar. Another former Amazon Live and Alibaba veteran acknowledged experimenting before Alibaba's Taobao Live went big and expressed optimism over its success in the West.

However, TikTok dumped its live e-commerce expansion plans in Europe and the U.S. in 2022 after its U.K. launch faced internal problems and struggled to gain traction with consumers.

An analyst also acknowledged the challenges for Amazon, which had exhausted most of its growth options.

Price Action: BABA shares traded higher by 3.54% at $123.34 on the last check Thursday.

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