Short video platform Moj is partnering with e-commerce player Flipkart To enable ‘Live E-commerce’ on its platform. Moj, which was launched in September 2020, almost two months after TikTok was banned in the market, has seen rapid growth and now has over 160 million monthly active users. It is hoping that the live e-commerce feature will help create a new monetization model for the platform and its makers.
“We wanted to partner with a player who has the most comprehensive catalogue and for which the supply side can be managed very well. Also someone has the best logistics because these are things we don’t have. And so we chose Flipkart,” said Manohar Singh Charan, chief financial officer of Mohalla Tech Pvt Ltd, the parent company of Moj. indianexpress.comThis is a multi-year exclusive deal between the brands.
ShareChat-owned Moj is hoping that like many other short video players in the business, its users will be more inclined to buy an item when they see an influencer wearing it or even actively promote it. . The live e-commerce feature has been tested by the company and will be rolled out extensively in the next two months.
But it’s not the only short-video player hoping to capitalize on a model that has proven highly successful in China. Glance’s Roposo already has a live e-commerce feature, while FacebookInstagram also has a shopping feature. Moj’s partnership is also inspired by examples from China, where video apps like Kuaishou have partnered with JD.com and Douyin (TikTok in China) has struck a similar deal with Alibaba.
“This partnership aims to capture the top of the funnel for e-commerce players. We have a huge audience that is regularly spending time on the app and the average time is huge,” explained Charan. The app plans to capture the intent of ‘impulse buy’ users by showing users a nudge or a notification with a link to a product on Flipkart.
But consistency of experience will be important as Moj will be showcasing products to users. How this would work is that in the video one can see the manufacturer wearing the jacket, and the algorithm will automatically throw up a notification saying, “This jacket is available on Flipkart.” The entire checkout experience will then take place on Moj itself, and the user will not need to switch apps.
On how the technology works to identify products, Charan explained that his algorithms will use reverse image search to match products to inactive cases. He also emphasized that a seamless user experience was important. “We don’t want users to switch from one app to another because it disrupts their experience,” he said. However, Moj still needs to conduct large-scale testing before fully rolling out the product, although pilot-testing for the technology has been completed.
The company is also looking at two models where notifications will be visible for live commerce. One would be passive tagging, where a piece of clothing or beauty or technology or any other product is automatically tagged by the system. The second or more active one would be where the creator is specifically paid to make a video promoting a product and then the link appears.
Step-wise, the active promotions in China are immense, and the company is hoping that they will be able to successfully make those models here as well. Of course, influencers will get a share of the revenue from this ‘live commerce’ experience, although this will depend on a number of factors.
“Our biggest reason to take this forward is to ensure that our impressive economy gets a boost. For creators, if they are able to generate livelihood by becoming Moj creators, they will be encouraged to make it their full time profession and their work,” said Charan.
The company aims to create $100 million of monetization opportunities every year for its creators by 2023, and expects e-commerce to play a big part in building that pool.
For now, Moj hasn’t set follower limits to decide whose video live commerce purchases will pop up. When asked whether passive tags would be enabled on all videos on the platform, Charan said while technically they can do so, they also need to ensure that the user experience is not spoiled. Right now, the company’s own experiments have shown that live commerce is proving to be more engaging than a banner ad.
“If it is at that scale, we will have no problem tagging purchasable items, wherever they are. It also places great emphasis on privatization. If there are users who hate seeing these pop-ups, those people eventually won’t see it,” Charan explained. But for active commerce cases where Moj calls a producer to shoot a video specifically Allows a product to be featured, the platform will explicitly select creators who have more than a certain threshold of followers.
When asked if Moj might partner with direct to consumer (D2C) brands for its live shopping feature in future, Charan said it is a possibility they are considering but there were challenges. “Often, with D2C brands, their logistics experience breaks down. But when you partner with a big e-commerce player, their strength is logistics, return COD and all that stuff. For example COD is a very important aspect in India not only in semi-urban but also in urban areas. Returning to COD becomes a bigger challenge because logistics is a bigger challenge,” he said, adding that with D2C brands it becomes difficult to control that experience.
“As a user, if you are placing an order with five different orders and three of those five orders are delayed, it is not Moj’s fault, but the user will blame us. One such partner What is needed is the logistics capabilities of which you can really rely on,” he insisted.