Apache Kafka is a scalable real-time backbone for innovation including retail industry building a live commerce sales platform.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Live commerce combines instant purchasing of a featured product and audience participation. The covid pandemic accelerated this trend. Live commerce emerged in China but arrived in the west across industries, no matter if you sell fashion, toys, cars, digital features, or anything else. This blog post explores the need for real-time data streaming with Apache Kafka between applications to enable live commerce across online stores and brick and mortar stores across regions, countries, and continents. The discussion covers several buildings blocks of a live commerce enterprise architecture. Retail topics include omnichannel retail, hyper-personalized customer communication, transactional data processing, and innovative entertainment with Augmented Reality. Other technical aspects cover the replayability of historical data and correlation with real-time events, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) applied to real-time data, and edge analytics in the retail store. «The arrival of Alibaba’s Taobao Live in May 2016 marked the opening of a new chapter in sales. The Chinese retail giant had pioneered a powerful new approach: linking up an online live stream broadcast with an e-commerce store to allow viewers to watch and shop at the same time,» reports McKinsey in a great article about the shopping revolution. They explain: «Live commerce combines instant purchasing of a featured product and audience participation through a chat function or reaction buttons. In China, live commerce has transformed the retail industry and established itself as a major sales channel in less than five years.» McKinsey shows the impressive growth of live commerce in China in the following diagram: In the meantime, live commerce arrived in the western world. The earliest adopters outside of China are the German beauty retailer Douglas, fashion retailer Tommy Hilfiger in Europe and the US, and the US retail giant Walmart. The global Covid pandemic was a huge driver, too. Live commerce helps brands and retailers to create value and increase online revenue. Online marketplaces, live auctions, influencer streaming, and live events such as a product launch drive sales in various ways: For example, AliExpress, an Alibaba subsidiary, launched a live commerce service called «AliExpress Live», which saw as many as 320,000 goods being added to the cart per one million views during a single live streaming session. The growth numbers and conversation rates are insane compared to the traditional retail history. It is no surprise that many retailers, auction houses, and social platforms want to get a piece of this enormous cake. Point-of-sale (POS) financing services in the United States have grown significantly over the past 24 months, especially since the onset of COVID-19. Trends fueling growth include digitization, rising merchant adoption, increasing repeat usage among younger consumers, and an expanding set of players targeting lending at point of sale, a service also known as » buy now, pay later. » reports McKinsey. We can see this trend across the globe. Companies like Klarna, Afterpay, and Paypal added BNPL to their primary products and apps. It is just one click away and often even set as the default payment option. The following diagram shows the «Buy Now, Pay Later Adoption by Generation,2019-2021″ from Cornerstone Advisors: BNPL is an excellent combination with live commerce. People can buy cool stuff even though they cannot afford it. A scary trend for people, but a massive opportunity for retailers (moral point of view excluded). Let’s now look at data streaming, and why this is so relevant for live commerce. Real-time data beats slow data. That’s true for almost every business scenario: Live commerce contains not just the active live sales activity but the whole end-to-end sales process, including payment, order fulfillment, shipping, and much more. Hence, don’t expect buying a live commerce COTS sales platform will solve all your challenges! Live commerce requires a great customer experience end to end. Most actions and data correlations should or even have to happen in real-time. Data correlation requires connectivity to the social platforms, the live commerce sales platform, and many other backend processes and applications: Several concepts play a role in live commerce to provide a good customer experience and increased conversion rate compared to traditional retail techniques: Live commerce requires the right action at the right time.
