Just in time for the holiday season, a West Coast company is inspiring shoppers to check items off their gift lists in a more immersive way. Empowering brands and creators through its livestream commerce platform, TalkShopLive combines content, connection and technology with live shopping to foster memorable experiences. With its new partnership with retail giant Walmart, the company is bringing more of these opportunities to sellers across the country.
LA-based TalkShopLive enables anyone — including creators like Oprah Winfrey and Paul McCartney and Fortune 500 brands like Best Buy and Fred Segal — to host their own live shows where they can endorse products directly to an online audience. Its solution integrates with commerce APIs, such as Walmart’s, to add point-of-sale capabilities to embeddable videos that can exist outside of their platform. This way, shoppers can instantly complete a purchase even if they’re on a separate site from the business they’re buying from.
“Because we’re an out-of-app experience and because of our embeddable player, we meet businesses where they’re at and help them meet their customers where they are,” Bryan Moore, TalkShopLive CEO and co-founder, told Built In. “And actually, I would say that is the huge differentiator between us and any other live commerce activities.”
The idea for TalkShopLive’s business model came to Moore when he was living abroad in Asia, where he watched the livestream commerce take off and grow into a multi-billion dollar industry. When Moore moved back to the United States, he spent time working with brands and creators through 20th Television and CBS, and the experience inspired him to question how to make the livestream commerce industry thrive in the North American market.
“No talent creator, brand, influencer or publisher in the U.S. wants to drive people to go download another app to get into the experience to potentially buy a product,” Moore said. “I think that the way for live commerce to win in North America is really to serve as the solution for the brands, retailers, publishers and creators, and how they can all work together.”
Moore and his sister Tina co-founded TalkShopLive in 2018, bootstrapping the company until its first funding round at the beginning of 2021. TalkShopLive launched its embeddable video player in 2019 and has since grown to establish partnerships with brands and retailers of all kinds. It also has ties with publications like Condé Nast and Meredith Corp. to distribute content.
To date, the company’s valuation reaches $74 million.
Moore anticipates 2022 being TalkShopLive’s largest year of growth to date, and it’s forging that path with its latest partnership.
Now that it’s fully integrated with Walmart, TalkShopLive enables every brand that has products on Walmart’s site to create in-video selling content and embed them across walmart.com, media outlets, brand sites, talents sites and social platforms. The two companies plan to release a suite of holiday programming that will be accessible at walmart.com/live, talkshop.live and other product partner sites. Its upcoming shows will feature personalities including Rachael Ray, Drew Barrymore, Taraji P. Henson, Gabrielle Union and others as it strives to create more memorable shopping experiences.
“Someone who purchased from the show told me that what was so great about it was [that] they spent an hour with Oprah, they remember what Oprah said the moment that they decided to buy the book and now every time they pick up that book, not only do they have the actual book, but they also have that experience with Oprah,” Moore said. “When we’ve turned so much into a buying culture that says to go and buy things, I think one of the things that’s so great about TalkShopLive is it brings the experience back to shopping in a digital age.”
