Agora's live commerce capabilities help retail brands and platforms like CommentSold interact with customers in new ways

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Oct. 25, 2023 -- Agora, Inc. (NASDAQ: API), a pioneer and leading platform for real-time engagement APIs, has announced the wide availability of its technology to power livestream shopping experiences. As the US market for live video shopping continues to rapidly expand, many well-known brands are investing in these capabilities to provide more engaging content and boost conversion rates. Agora's solution helps brands, marketplaces, and platforms seize the livestream shopping opportunity by building live shoppable live streaming experiences with ease.

In addition to shoppable livestreams, Agora's solution supports live auctions, personal shopper experiences, and e-commerce-related video chat for customer service. CommentSold, the leading fashion live selling platform for retailers, recently began working with Agora to provide its customers with multi-source live stream shopping. The new functionality allows sellers to invite external participants into their shows by simply sending them a link or QR code. This makes it easy for sellers to invite celebrity guests or VIP customers to join the live shopping session via video while maintaining complete control over guests' video and audio streams.

"We are absolutely thrilled to enable a paradigm shift in live selling with these features which will open up new ways for CommentSold sellers to gamify live selling shows 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 stream shopping events. Additionally, they can invite VIP customers to their live shows, further boosting interactivity, which eventually translates to higher sales for our sellers."

Live commerce is an exciting new trend in the world of e-commerce, where customers can make purchases during live streaming video events. This new way of shopping is already hugely popular in Asia and is starting to gain traction in the US. According to McKinsey & Company, live-commerce-initiated sales could account for 20% of all e-commerce by 2026, and the US livestream shopping market is estimated to be worth $35 billion by 2024.

Livestream shopping has become increasingly popular as consumers continue to seek out new ways to shop online. With the help of Agora's real-time engagement technology – recently highlighted in Gartner's Market Guide for Live Commerce in Retail – brands can now provide a more immersive and engaging shopping experience to their customers.

"We're thrilled to be at the forefront of the rapidly growing livestream shopping market and to have such a trusted partner in this exciting venture," said Tony Zhao, CEO of Agora. "Our technology allows platforms like CommentSold to easily integrate interactive live video shopping experiences that create a more personal and engaging shopping experience for customers, while driving higher revenue for sellers."

For more information about Agora's livestream shopping capabilities, please visit:

https://www.agora.io/en/solutions/live-shopping/ 

For more information about CommentSold's multi-source live stream shopping, please visit: https://try.commentsold.com/features/multi-source/

Agora just wrapped its RTE Live Shopping webinar series, which featured insights from e-commerce leaders on everything marketplaces and retailers need to know about live commerce. On-demand recordings of all 4 sessions can be found here.

About Agora

Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Agora is a pioneer and global leader in Real-Time Engagement Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), providing developers with simple, flexible, and powerful application programming interfaces, or APIs, to embed real-time voice, video, interactive live-streaming, chat, whiteboard, and artificial intelligence capabilities into their applications.

About CommentSold 

CommentSold is the North American leader in live selling technology (ranked by G2), having empowered over 7,000 small to mid-sized retailers with live selling tools, generating over 166 million items sold with $3.8 billion in lifetime GMV. The platform continues to provide businesses and creators of all sizes with best-in-class solutions for delivering engaging live video commerce experiences across multiple sales channels simultaneously. In 2022, CommentSold expanded its offerings through the acquisition of Popshoplive, a community-driven livestream shopping marketplace app. The platform's innovations include Videeo, a lightweight video commerce plugin technology, enabling retailers and brands to seamlessly integrate and go live with engaging, branded live video commerce experiences.

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