Abby’s live shopping platform relies on Agora for crystal clear real-time video and voice.
About ABBY
While e-commerce is now the standard way for consumers to shop, Abby’s founder believes there is something missing in the traditional online buying experience: human interaction. Nidhi Sharma founded Abby—an innovative live online shopping platform—to upgrade e-commerce with real-time, two-way interaction between shoppers and product experts.
Abby’s live online shopping platform is an ecosystem where brands, shopping experts, and consumers come together for “shopatainment.” Trained shopping experts demonstrate products across categories like beauty, apparel, fitness, and home goods while answering shoppers’ questions live. Founded in India, Abby is currently in the process of building a community of millennial and GenZ online shoppers.
“With real-time engagement, Abby is adding the missing human element to the standard impersonal and clinical world of online shopping. 62% of our users listed live communication with shopping experts as their favorite feature.“
Nidhi Sharma, Founder, Abby
The Power of Real-Time Engagement
Before founding Abby, Nidhi worked as a host on live shopping TV channels for over 8 years. That experience helped her learn the power of live shopping, but also the limitations of TV as the channel. On traditional TV, there is no good solution for bidirectional communication between shoppers and hosts. Taking live shopping to mobile devices and adding real-time, interactive chat solves this problem. The Abby platform is unique in its offering of both live product demos and two-way interaction between shopping experts and shoppers.
Watching a live product demo with the ability to interact and get your specific questions answered helps to bridge the gap between online shopping and physically getting the feel of the product before you buy. This also allows brands to engage more deeply with customers and receive near-instant feedback from users on any important questions. While this format is obvious for product categories like beauty and apparel, it can also work for categories like automobiles, insurance and travel.
Products used
Enabling a Delightful Real-Time Shopping Experience
In their search for a live streaming partner, Abby researched and weighed Agora against its competitors. Agora won on these fronts:
- One-stop solution for video/voice streaming, real-time messaging, and cloud recording
- Quick and easy implementation
- High-quality, scalable video and audio streaming
- Low-latency global network
- Clear pricing
- Start-up program support
With live shopping, the limited-time nature of offers means that it’s essential for the live stream to be in sync with the audience, without any lag or technical issues. Any lag between audience and shoppers can slow down the pace of the show, making it less exciting and engaging. Abby tested their initial minimum viable product with Agora for two live streams and got a 100% approval rating.
After implementing Agora, Abby surveyed its users and found that over 62% of users listed two-way communication with shopping experts as the most appealing live shopping feature. Users were also impressed with the seamless live video streaming from Agora and over 80% users found Abby’s live stream to work even better than Instagram Live.
“A live shopping business like Abby relies heavily on the quality of the live video, audio and chat for shoppers. We found the perfect solution with Agora. The Agora team has been super supportive and helped us to enable a delightful real-time shopping experience for our customers.”
Nidhi Sharma, Founder, Abby
“Agora enables our seamless live shopping experience, by providing crystal clear video and voice with minimum latency and real-time messaging. 80% of our users preferred Abby’s experience over Instagram Live.”
NIDHI SHARMA, FOUNDER, ABBY
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