Live Streaming Shopping App Development: Cost, Tech Stack, and Benefits

Today, we can all agree on one undeniable truth: the pandemic has irrevocably changed the way we shop. It's no surprise that online shopping is at the center of emerging trends. The e-commerce industry, one of the most successful today, continues to expand thanks to a new boom in the live shopping market.

Read also: E-commerce Tech Trends for 2023

This article discusses the benefits and covers all the important aspects of building a live stream shopping platform, from choosing the best technology stack to pricing the app.

According to Coresight research, a global advisory and research firm, the U.S. livestreaming market will reach $25 billion by 2023, while the Chinese live-stream market has reached $150 billion in 2020 and will continue to grow up to $300 billion in 2021. That means live streaming e-commerce is a key trend that brands and retailers adapt to stay ahead of the competition. Plus, if you're wondering exactly how live-stream e-commerce is driving retailers, enjoy reading the related topic on our blog.

With these video conferencing trends and statistics in mind, our goal is to share our niche experience in building video conferencing solutions to provide you with all the tips and tricks when developing a live streaming e-commerce platform.

Read also: Video Conferencing Trends in 2023

So, let's cut to the chase and figure out video shopping app development.

According to the global survey during the second quarter in 2021, online video content watch reached 92% among internet users.

Benefits of implementing video commerce into your platform

By definition, live e-commerce or live video streaming commerce is a platform or service used to provide merchants with the ability to sell products using live video streaming. When discussing why various software companies or startups are better off using this fast-growing channel, there must be a specific list of opportunities that such platforms have to offer.

Let's now discuss the advantages of live streaming shopping app development to help you understand what all this fuss is about.

Enhanced brand awareness & loyalty

In most cases, your brand awareness depends on attracting millions of customers and convincing them to try your product. That's why a custom live shopping solution motivates a newcomer to get acquainted with your brand through videos. Recommendations can also help get the required marketing effects to attract more people to know about your solution and build loyalty to your brand.

With the help of interactive tools, you are more likely to grab a wider audience and make them focused. Let's take the current statistics, for example. According to the global survey during the second quarter in 2021, online video content watch reached 92% among internet users. It says video streaming has become the most popular online format worldwide. As such, video content lends weight to your brand awareness and explains the increased demand for video trading solutions.

Reduced distribution costs

The extra costs of traditional shipping of your products are less relevant for live stream ecommerce software solutions. It means that every product can be directly sold from the warehouse. This way, live streaming platforms are significantly benefiting from reduced distribution costs.

Besides, the video commerce platform makes collecting and managing orders much easier. That means that if processes such as shipping or product labeling can be streamlined, it reduces the potential for overheads.

Slava Ivanov

Global IT partnerships and Strategic development

Contact Slava to get more info on a live streaming shopping app development

Learn more

Learn more

Higher conversions and driving more leads

Higher conversions are expected when you integrate video commerce into your platforms. When consumers intend to make a purchasing decision, they often find helpful videos to help them choose the right product. As a result, your live e-commerce app will generate more subscriptions and increase the likelihood of reaching targeted leads.

Increased sales

As soon as more people connect to your e-commerce platform, your sales will grow fast. Here we can add that the concept of live e-commerce improves the overall ROI (return on investment) of your online business.

Improved customer experience

By leveraging live streaming shopping apps, you can enforce your consumers with the top-notch experience you give them. As a salesperson, you will also become a customer service representative. Despite the product demo, you can explain the product's various characteristics, compare those details with existing alternatives, and discuss the pros and cons. As a result, you will increase interest in your product and provide a quality customer experience.

Live Shopping Solution Tech Stack

With the basics in place, you can start thinking about the features you need to implement into your platform.

Beginner or pro, you might find it difficult to figure out which tools and technologies are best for your product features. To understand what covers under the hood of live video shopping app development, let's consider what we prefer to create reliable and effective web and mobile solutions.

Running on several platforms, specific technologies power your web and mobile applications. Among the different frameworks, programming languages, and tools that exist to create live streaming platforms, you should choose those that can solve the existing challenges of digital e-commerce solutions and provide a seamless customer experience.

Before video shopping app development for e-commerce platforms, consider the following tech stack to achieve your product goals best.

Swift

The Swift language is specifically designed to write apps for Apple platforms. Being a high-level programming language for IOS app development, Swift is based on Objective-C. Thus, it is commonly used to build various software platforms and programs.

Kotlin

Kotlin is another widely used language for web, cross-platform and Android app development. It is a high level of strongly statically typed language and can produce wonderful results among the developers. In the Android development space, Kotlin is the priority choice.

Javascript, Typescript

Javascript is a scripting language used to create interactive web pages with first-class functions.

Typescript extends Javascript by adding types to the language and better tooling at any scale. Both are popular for building web applications.

Node.js

Node.js is a back-end JavaScript runtime environment that runs on various platforms and uses JavaScript on the server-side. Developers prefer Node.js as a single-threaded, non-blocking, and memory-efficient open source server environment.

Twilio

Twilio is a single platform frequently applied to implement videoconferencing, email, voice, and chats. It has flexible APIs for any channel to engage customers at every step of their journey. Twilio offers successful developers the ease of use and reliability to run the most demanding applications.

According to Coresight research, the U.S. livestreaming market will reach $25 billion by 2023, while the Chinese live-stream market has reached $150 billion in 2020 and will continue to grow up to $300 billion in 2021.

Mediasoup

Mediasoup provides a low-level API for various use cases and scenarios such as group video chat applications or one-to-many (or few-to-many) broadcast applications in real-time without any restrictions.

WebRTC

WebRTC is an open framework for the web that provides real-time communications (RTC) capabilities in a browser via APIs. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Opera are supported, developing high-quality RTC applications for the browser or mobile platforms. With a core competency in developing customized video conferencing solutions, we used WebRTC to build a custom virtual event app that can host both virtual and hybrid events.

Read also: Hybrid Event App Development

AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an easy-to-use cloud platform that offers inexpensive and scalable cloud computing services. It is broadly adopted by many leading businesses and offers a wide range of cloud products, such as networking, management tools, databases, storage analytics.

It is important to note that the mix of technologies can vary depending on the initial business requirements and the product development roadmap.

How to Integrate Livestream Shopping Into Your E-commerce Platform

After considering the platform options and the appropriate tech stack to develop an interactive live shopping solution, the next step is to ensure a smooth integration into your e-commerce business. Undoubtedly, the benefits of increased customer engagement or higher sales encourage retailers to incorporate live-streaming shopping. However, there are other issues to consider before integrating into your e-commerce business.

To do that, we define at least three steps to help you build your unique experience with live-streaming shopping.

1. Think of the barriers live-streaming shopping can solve. For example, this means that through virtual try-on sessions or in-store demonstrations, consumers are more likely to make a purchasing decision. You can define many opportunities to differentiate your e-commerce business from the other specialized retailers in the social commerce space.

For example, in the picture below, as a furniture retailer, you can demonstrate the comfort and convenience of different sizes of models or differences in the fabrics of the sofa collection.

2. Select the right platform. In general, there are two ways of enabling the live-streaming shopping concept. The first is to integrate your platform with the retailer's e-commerce platform, and the second is to host it on a third-party platform like Amazon or Facebook. However, integrating a real-time shopping app into your website or mobile apps gives you most of the control over your overall customer experience, inventory, or shopping carts management.

3. Consider live-streaming content. Thinking ahead always helps to achieve more tangible results. With your native live streaming platform, you can also enhance product detail pages or use this content in other channels.

By completing these steps, you will understand how to use live shopping streams best to meet the basic needs of your e-commerce business. You have a variety of ways to satisfy consumer needs and simplify certain aspects of shopping.

How Much Does it Cost to Build a Live Streaming Application

The seamless and profitable implementation of live video shopping app development costs may vary depending on business requirements. Why? Count the time and money expenditures, features of live streaming application, ongoing maintenance, and possible post-release support.

All the factors put at once can exceed your financial capabilities, especially if you are a startup or small business. That is probably the key reason most startups choose to start with MVP development. Here, you can think of designing the MVP version of the product and skip a lot from market research. By developing an MVP version or a minimum viable product, you can expect the basic functionality to test its performance in the marketplace.

Whether you decide to develop a web solution, a mobile app, an MVP product, or consider streaming integration, let's take a closer look at the top value by following the basic steps in the process of live video shopping app development.

Market research, estimation & UI/UX design

Mobile app development:

280 hours/ $8400

Web development:

240 hours/ 7200$

MVP:

120 hours/ 3600$

Streaming integration:

30 hours/ 900$

The discovery phase is the first and foremost step of any app development process. In brief, during this stage, we formalize all the product specifications. Our business analysts research the market, explore customers' expectations and evaluate industry demands. Also, we set the project goals, timelines and calculate the preliminary budget to agree with our clients.

During the UX design, our business analysts then start developing application prototypes and wireframes to help the rest of the development team assess how well the chosen live shopping technology stack, features, and overall aesthetics will meet the client's expectations. After all, we agree with the client on usability and screen design features and move on to the core video shopping app development.

Social network with outstanding video capabilities

The app combines social networking with high quality video calls and streaming

Read more

Social network with outstanding video capabilities

Development stage

Mobile app development:

640 hours/ $25600

Web development:

600 hours / 24 000$

MVP:

330 hours / 13200$

Streaming integration:

100 hours / 4000$

Your live shopping platform development process should definitely start with the following features:

• User registration;

A registration form is essential to create a personal user account.

• Login;

The login page is important to access the app data with a proper level of security.

• Admin dashboard;

Admin panel is needed to control all processes with app accounts. It allows you to manage your user accounts, messages, or events.

• Notifications;

Small reminders of new products on your site or app help users stay informed of any possible updates.

• Cart management;

Shopping carts facilitate the process of purchasing and selling your products. It helps to organize the information distributed to the merchant and other parties and accepts the customer’s payments.

• Payment gateway;

By integrating payment gateways, you will ensure the security of financial transactions and provide a reliable payment system for your users.

• Product pages with high-quality images;

Viewing your products with high-resolution quality is one of the main benefits of a live streaming shopping app. It builds customer confidence in the products you sell.

• Product description;

Product description is a must-have feature that allows shoppers to view detailed information about the product they are about to buy.

• Product reviews and ratings;

You can easily improve your customer experience and provide top-level service based on reviews and ratings.

• Order history;

Order history is needed to be in place to view statistics and any data about the customer's shopping process.

Our development team implemented all the app features based on all app specifications and requirements gathered before. We can additionally determine the specific tech stack during this stage. When we create all the features from scratch, it is important to match the project estimates and choose the best tools, database, or CRM to implement a reliable and hassle-free live streaming shopping app.

Testing & Launch

Mobile live shopping app development:

240 hours/ $6500

Web development:

220 hours / 6000$

MVP:

100 hours / 2700$

Streaming integration:

35 hours / 950$

Development hours may also vary depending on the complexity of the application. Before the final app release, our QA engineers make regular unit tests to check if your application has any bugs that need to be fixed. This way, we ensure that the final app is not prone to potential glitches and gets to market faster.

Writing technical documentation

Mobile app development:

40 hours/ $1600

Web development:

35 hours / 1400$

MVP:

20 hours / 800$

Streaming integration:

15 hours / 600$

This step is necessary to create a single document containing all the information and instructions for your product.

Now, let's sum up the time and app development cost expenditures via the table below.

Time & Cost
Stages	Mobile app	Web development	MVP	Streaming integration
Market research, estimation & UI/UX design	280 hours $8400	240 hours 7200$	120 hours 3600$	30 hours 900$
Development stage	640 hours $25600	600 hours 24 000$	330 hours 13200$	100 hours 4000$
Testing & Launch	240 hours $6500	220 hours 6000$	100 hours 2700$	35 hours 950$
Writing technical documentation	40 hours $1600	35 hours 1400$	20 hours 800$	15 hours 600$
Total:	1200 hours +/- $42100 +/-	1095 hours +/- 38600$ +/-	570 hours +/- 20300$ +/-	180 hours +/- 6450$ +/-

Features	Time	Cost
User registration	20 hours	800$
Login	15 hours	600$
Admin dashboard	50 hours	2000$
Notifications	60 hours	2400$
Cart management	80 hours	3200$
Payment gateway	100 hours	4000$
Product pages	80 hours	3200$
Product description	30 hours	1200$
Product reviews and rating	40 hours	1600$
Order history	20 hours	800$

In any case, we are always ready to meet your budget or advise and implement any ideas. Plus, we have similar experience in developing live streaming apps with creativity. Find out more on building a live-streaming app and get your questions answered.

Softermii E-commerce Background

We offer you embrace an out-of-box shopping experience with the related competence of our video streaming service development. Our clients completely trust us to implement any bold ideas into a custom end-to-end live shopping solution. Based on the various use cases and projects we have implemented, we provide the best user experience and increase brand awareness by the end of the app's release phase.

Parta Video Conferencing Solution

For example, when building a Parta app, we achieved excellent results and met tight deadlines despite the challenges we faced.

Parta app is an audio and video-conferencing solution that nave a set of key features, such as:

• Broadcasting;
• Streaming;
• Private calls;
• Video rooms;
• Following;
• Room moderation;
• AI-generated news feed;
• Gifts and donates.

We put much effort into creating a social media network app during the development process. One of the main challenges we faced was Parta's transition from a web-based platform to a mobile app due to the widespread popularity of TikTok, Clubhouse, and Instagram apps.

Read also: How to Build an App like TikTok

However, our team managed to deliver MVP in three months and the final product in seven months. Our professional team used new technologies to cope with the complexity of the app development and provide the client with a working, competitive application.

As a result, the list of technologies we used to develop a video conferencing solution for Parta Social consists of MediaSoup, React Native, Redux, Node.JS, AWS, and GraphQL.

VidRTC

We created a video conferencing and streaming engine called VidRTC that simplifies the development of live-streaming and conferencing software services.

Task

We wanted to develop a tool for various industries with basic features:

• Video calls
• Live-streaming
• Calendars
• Text messages

We also set ourselves the task of making this platform intuitively easy to use and seamlessly customizable.

Solution

Our team developed a communication platform applicable for all niches and adapted to any industry's needs. You can conduct one-on-ones, broadcast to a small group, host conferences and have live-streaming sessions.

Results

VidRTC is accessible for everyone without a long-lasting education. And here's what we managed to achieve after development:

• 1000+ calls can be hosted with one media server
• Up to 200 users can be hosted in one room
• 25,000+ viewers can join your broadcast

After discussing real examples from our dedicated portfolio, we can now share our valuable experience to help you anticipate certain challenges on the road to developing an online live video shopping app.

Streamotion

We leveraged the livestream commerce trend and successfully implemented it in our Streamotion app.

Challenge

Our team had to enter the emerging livestream commerce market and build a mobile app using video broadcasting technologies. We also had to implement group broadcasts and social features like messaging and feed.

Solution

We used our WebRTC-based VidRTC engine to implement live streaming and broadcasting features, including group broadcasts. Our experts also took care of text chat, feed, and payment integrations.

Result

Riding the trend wave, Streamotion got considerable achievements. The app had 20,000 installs in just two weeks after launch and gathered about 80 sellers.

Get Inspired by Livestreaming Trends with Softermii

Overall, market forecasts indicate that many retailers and brands are joining the already moving bandwagon of live shopping platform development. The biggest benefits consumers are interested in are seeing products, understanding selling features, and asking questions before purchasing. During live streaming, consumers can easily purchase goods and enjoy useful features of the visualized products.

To achieve this goal, now is the perfect time to engage your audience, increase sales, and beat the competition with livestreaming shopping potential. What's more, with our dedicated development team and deep experience in streaming technologies, you'll automatically cut your risk by at least half. As a result, a bug-free and robust c2c live app will be ready to suit your business and user demands.

Contact us and let's monetize your online business using the latest technologies and trends to expand your prospects on the e-commerce market!