Now, the company developing “real-time engagement” APIs, is making its live shopping technology widely available to help more brands create live commerce experiences, including shoppable shows, online auctions, live, live streams from personal shoppers and more. The solution has been in beta since 2022.
With Agora’s Live Shopping API, any business can incorporate interactive live streams into their platform and potentially increase sales by showcasing their products in real-time. The technology is also useful in providing support to customers through live chat. Other features include multiple camera angles, video subtitles, reaction emojis, polls, live streaming, and custom filters.
Agora is also testing new capabilities, the company revealed to us. For example, Agora has a ai-powered video content moderation extension in beta version from the trust and security company ActiveFence, which allows sellers to protect their users from harmful or inappropriate content. Another experimental tool is real time transcription, which provides live ai-powered transcription and captioning services. The company is also working on new signaling features to improve synchronization.
“Agora’s real-time engagement platform has been selected by leading brands and retail platforms and is powering the live shopping experience for hundreds of sites and apps, from fashion brands to professional sports teams,” Tony told TechCrunch Zhao, CEO of Agora.
Zhao added that Agora customers have seen “up to 3x increases in conversion rates after implementation.”
A client who uses the new technology is CommentSold, a live selling platform that empowers over 7,000 small and medium-sized fashion retailers. The company leverages the functionality to allow vendors to invite collaborators to their shows with a link or QR code. When guests join the live shopping session, users can still maintain control over the live stream.
CommentSold has facilitated over $3.8 billion in lifetime gross merchandise value (GMV).
“We are absolutely excited to enable a paradigm shift in live sales with these features, which will open up new ways for CommentSold sellers to gamify live sales programs and drive engagement,” said Andrew Chen, Chief Product Officer at CommentSold. “Now sellers can leverage professional hosts, celebrities and creators to co-host or host their live shopping events. Additionally, they can invite VIP customers to their live shows, which further drives interactivity, which eventually translates into higher sales for our sellers.”
In addition to live shopping, Agora has a broad product offering, including digital whiteboards for educational businesses, a software development kit (SDK) for voice calling, 3D spatial audio extension, telehealth technology, and more.
