Over the past few years, the concept of live-streamed shopping has become incredibly popular in certain parts of the world, Asia in particular, with social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok rolling out features to take advantage of the trend.
Millions of viewers tune in to watch their favorite influencers and social media celebrities shopping for clothes and other items, with many experts predicting the trend was set to revolutionize the online shopping and ecommerce sector.
Instagram was eager to get involved, launching a live shopping feature in 2020 that allowed creators to tag products directly in their streams.
However, it would appear that western audiences are less keen on live shopping than many had predicted, with Instagram announcing that they are removing some of the features from the platform in March of this year.
The option to tag products in streams will no longer be available to creators, indicating that Instagram is taking a significant step back from the live shopping trend.
The news comes after TikTok also confirmed that it was to scale back its live-stream shopping efforts in Europe and the US, citing poor sales and negative user responses.
An initial surge of popularity for live stream commerce in the west was to be short-lived, with many experts now attributing this positive early performance to the pandemic. Now that lockdowns are over and consumers are free to shop in person again, it would seem that live stream shopping is, for now, not viable for western markets.
