The E-Comm Show
The E-Comm Show
The Future of Social Commerce: How Shoppable Video is Changing Everything with Eitan Koter from Vimmi | EP. 214
Shoppable video is quickly becoming the most profitable acquisition channel in e-commerce, and this episode breaks down why.
In Episode #214 of The E-Comm Show, Andrew Maff sits down with Eitan Koter, Co-CEO of Vimmi, to unpack the future of social commerce, TikTok Shop, live shopping, and AI-powered personalization.
You’ll learn how brands are turning short-form video into scalable revenue, why authentic UGC outperforms polished production, and how to deploy shoppable content across every channel: web, social, marketplaces, and live events.
Whether you're a marketer, founder, or brand leader, this episode will show you the strategies driving the next wave of e-commerce growth.
What You’ll Learn:
- The rise of shoppable video and social commerce
- How TikTok Shop reshaped buyer behavior
- Live shopping as a conversion engine
- UGC + customer-generated content that actually sells
- The role of AI in personalized shopping experiences
- How to scale video across every channel
SOCIALS
📱 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BlueTuskr
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bluetuskr/
📻 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bluetuskr/
📧 Email: info@bluetuskr.com
GUEST SOCIALS
📱 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vimmicom
📻 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eitankoter/
▶️ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@VimmiCommunications
Obviously long form video works very well like YouTube across the board, but shoppable is likely your main your main vehicles to drive growth and supporting that by probably a live show. I think this can be like a very, very good strategy.
Narrator:Welcome to the E comm Show podcast. I am your host. Andrew Maff, owner and founder of BlueTusker, from groundbreaking industry updates to success stories and strategies. Get to know the ins and outs of the Ecommerce industry from top leaders in the space. Let's get into it.
Andrew Maff:Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the E commerce show as usual. I am your host, Andrew Maff, and today I am joined by the amazing Eitan Koter, who is the co founder, co CEO over at Vimmi Eitan, how you doing, buddy? Ready for good show?
Eitan Koter:Totally excited to join your show. How are you?
Andrew Maff:Doing good man, super excited to have you on the show. So actually, the timing of this is fantastic. So as of the recording of this show, it is the Wednesday before Black Friday, Cyber Monday, that whole fun weekend. And so obviously, having you on the show, especially with everything that Vimmi does, I'm super excited for this one. But I always like to kind of start these off relatively stereotypically. I want to give you the floor and just tell us a little bit about yourself and about Vimmi, and we're going to take it from there, okay?
Eitan Koter:Yeah, sure. So I'm already, like, two decades in the video space, right? We started when video was analog, and just starting the transition to digital. This is before the iPhone, before streaming, before everything, right? And my CEO back then told me that, hey, you want to go into this industry. So think about it again. Because, I mean, you can get in, but there's no way to get out, you know, like this Hotel California, song by The Eagles, right? You can check out anytime you like, but, but you can never leave, right? So it's really the same. So I've been seeing this transition of video across, you know, different industries, and the evolution of video, which is now obviously so spread with streaming and Netflix on the media entertainment side, but also video on the retail and commerce. And we see the merge of media and commerce actually converging and making this this exciting opportunities, specifically like we see today, obviously with Tiktok shop and short form videos and live streaming and live shopping and yeah, and I founded Vimmi about 12 years ago. We are focused on we are a SaaS platform, and we work with brands internationally, and we help them use video to create a brand awareness, but also to convert to actual sales using video across multiple channels, whether it's their own storefront, social networks and marketplaces.
Andrew Maff:Nice, I actually live in Westchester, Pennsylvania, which is where QVC is. And over the past, like several years, there's always been chatter of like, people that are getting laid off, and then new people coming in, because they're basically trying to move more into this model. So how? Tell me a little bit about like, where you see the successes in it, and where you don't, I'm still, I can see certain brands how they would do really well with this. I can see how others maybe not so much. Like, what, what are the necessities that a brand has to have in order to make something like this work?
Eitan Koter:Yeah, I mean, think about acquisition, which is so expensive these days, across any channel, right? And obviously, if you, if you focus on short form videos organically, you can scale and build brand awareness, and just having this exposure create, I would say, cheaper than any other channels out there, right? So, yeah, it's all about quantities, right? And working with affiliates, also user generated content, which is much more powerful than brand owned content, right? So working with affiliates, whether it's on Instagram, Tiktok, Facebook, YouTube, because all those channels just give your brands much more exposure, and also today the ability to convert as well your shoppers to actual purchases. So this is definitely working, and we see that Tiktok also helped us educate us on using, let's say, video entertainment or educational video for the purpose of conversions, right? And we see the numbers that are just exploding across Tiktok shop, and this is just one definitely driver for social commerce around there. Now, obviously in China, for example, like live shopping is big, right? So there are sellers there that are just, this is the day job for years, and they are selling millions a year just from doing that. Still in the US still. And I would say a lot of brands have experience, experimented with it, with live shopping, it's a more of a complex type of experience and an event. We need to plan it in advance. You need to just notify your audiences, pre, during and after the show. It's something that needs to be more structured, and there needs to be some kind of an incentive during those events to make them successful. And we see great success stories and. Those brands are selling like, you know, those conversion rates if it's done right, or can hit like, 30% of the users, because very interactive, if it's done smart and obviously using like multi channel for streaming and building up the FOMO prior to the event, this can be very, very successful events, and they don't have to be too polished, or, like, premium production, it's right, the authenticity works well, but it needs to be interesting, exciting. Like, need to have, like these moving parts always, like changing colors in the background. It needs to be very interesting. Think about it like a YouTube video, right? It needs to have some kind of you cannot see someone just talking all day long, right? And so, yeah, I mean, this is, like, live shopping is still, I know there are a lot of companies and influencers and like Gary Vee, I mean, they're just so bullish on live shopping. And I know the adoption is happening in a good way in much more extensively, like in specific sectors, maybe like beauty, cosmetics, things that you can show, like re transformation, just using the product and see immediately that there is some kind of a change, and other sectors are just catching up, right? So, yeah, this is, I think, the status, obviously, long form video works very well, like YouTube across the board. But shoppable is like your main your main vehicles to drive growth and supporting that by probably a live show. I think that's can be like a very, very good strategy, again, very authentic, low cost, just putting yourself out there with the great things that you have and also the things that you're not that good at. That balance of making yourself vulnerable across these channels is something which is very powerful in today's ecosystem.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, do you? So they're treated more like an event. It's not like, you know, sometimes people just randomly go live on Tiktok or on Instagram or something like that. This is more like, if you're in the B to B world, it's like, you're doing a webinar. So you're saying, like, hey, you know, next week we're going to be going live, and then, you know, you have to have some type of hook to get them to actually attend. So is there? Do you find that the brands that do really well with it are the ones that are already leaning pretty heavy into social media? Or is it something that, like, even if you don't have, like, a huge social following, you can still kind of make it work?
Eitan Koter:Yeah, you can still make it work. Because anyone who's just joining the event can share this event if it's interesting with his network, right? And if you are streaming that to an influencer account, if he's joining as a co host, then you have this multiplication of his audience or her audiences as well. And, and, yes, I mean, you need to have some kind of an incentive, right? So, like a discount or a new product launch, or some coupon code or, you know, some something that makes it really interesting. So it doesn't work for all products, right? So, assuming you have a products, you know, you want to get rid of an inventory or something, you actually just, you know, there is some kind of a special campaign or special discount for that. For this product line, gamification is really nice, just important to keep users engaged. And what we see also like an emergence of like consultants and experts in this category is just supporting brands and operating this type of events, because it's not just how much you sell during the event. It's a very powerful tool, because it's live and it's real. People are craving for this human to human connection. And it's very, very powerful in terms of brand building, and just building relationship with with users out there, in terms of brand loyalty, okay? And just seeing, you know, who are the brand leaders. They need to be in the show. They need to put themselves out there. It's, I think, a fundamental requirement for any founder, brand founder out there, just putting, putting yourself out there. It doesn't have to be polished or professional, as we say, but it needs to be real. And it's a great vehicle for building the community right. And there is a new ecosystem that I talk a lot about, which is the 3Cs of this new digital economy. Which the first C is is obviously content, right? So specifically, video content that builds community right? And the second C and community which is well managed, is a very, very powerful army of loyal customers. That is, I think, is fundamental for doing business this day. And the third C is commerce, right? So, content, build community, community generated commerce and actual sales and business. So these are the steps I think you need to take. And video is so powerful and just, the just doing that. So if you, if you, you mentioned the webinar, right? I mean, think about it. It's you don't have to put a lot of effort. Maybe you need few slides, right? And just maybe invite someone, and you can, you can do a webinar. The same philosophy should be on these live events and video production, video creations, just go out there, you know, share a few. Products, you know, make them interesting, put some incentives, create some form around that. Doing the marketing, we see a lot of sales that are generated post the event completely. So if you keep the inventory there for at least 24-48 hours, a lot of people that couldn't join or anything, they will join the link. They will redirect it to the recording, and they will make a purchase in the video. Which is really interesting.
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Andrew Maff:I can see, you know, we've had some conversations with several brands we work with that have started to kind of look at possibly exploring this. Because what we've found as well is, you know, when you can do, if you have a big social following, and you can really promote it, and you're doing like a product drop or something like that, and you're turning it into like a cool, fun event of this new product, that makes a ton of sense. Another thing that we've really started to look at it for is for brands that have complicated products, like ones that require a lot of explanation. Like to give you an example, there's a brand we work with, super awesome brand outside of just south south Florida, and they sell all different types of grills, and they always have issues with so many different questions and things like that. And but they have the whole warehouse, and they're like, Oh, if I could just get people to come here. And so now we started talking about, like, you could literally just go live and walk around and talk about each grill and answers people questions as they come in, yes. And so it's stuff like that too, where we thought about, even for brands, that maybe you're not getting a ton of sales in one spot, but maybe you have a really complicated, expensive product that requires some education, where it isn't an awesome opportunity to actually show someone the product and talk to them about it, is that, do you see that it tends to be more brands that are social heavy, or more brands that are kind of education heavy?
Eitan Koter:Yeah, I think it's all of the above right. And we also have like B to B use cases, which are very, very interesting, not just for pushing products for sale, but also for education and training. And that live experience is very, very powerful. And if you plan it right, think about it. You can just take customer objections that you know and in advance, just answer all these objections. Right? So the sale is going to be much easier the next time. Doesn't matter if it's D to C or B to B. It's very interesting aspect of what we do. I wanted to highlight another use case that we see that is emerging right now, which we call like it's kind of a UGC generated content. So think about existing customers, okay, that are incentivized to a reward program or through the loyalty program to generate videos. Yeah, even, even share those videos on their own network, but also return those videos to the brand. They can become like your affiliate. So think about your army of customers. Some of them are happy to create videos. They get some more points on a loyalty program or some other incentive. But they share it with all net, with the whole network, and we can track that affiliate link and actually provide and actually incentivize them through affiliate commission. So this is another use case that something you can do from the Vimmi platform that is like emerging right now, and it's evolving because marketers are trying to be creative. How can they generate leads or market opportunities right with the existing assets that they have? So it's part of like in retention, while you're already communicating with the customer about the product and whether maybe it's a customer support issue, you give them an opportunity also to join, you know, kind of your marketing activities, and incentivize them in a very, very smart way. So this is another, another use case that we feel is, is relevant, and definitely, as you said, video is, I mean, it needs to be defined, right? So there are, like, few stages in the in the marketing funnel, let's say, and some of these videos are working well, well in different, different stages. So if you just simplified it during the awareness stage, let's say you're launching a new product, you're launching a new brand, right? So a lot of educational content should be produced, right? So like marketing information checklists, and this is one of the scenarios that as you as you explained, right, you showcase probably information about the category, not specifically about the product, but more educational content, about about about the specific niche. Then when your users are probably in consideration, stage or probably evaluating few options, then you can. Provide even information about your competitors. Yes, don't be afraid to do that, because it's really respectful, because you anyhow your potential shoppers. They're going to search for competition. They're looking, going to look for other products as well. So why don't you just share with share it with them. We see this working very well. Remember, like probably a few few years ago where all these versus blog was issued by the affiliates, right on the website, this versus this. Now it's been generated by the brands themselves, but they are have, they're not no problem just mentioning competition. Even provide the links to their competitors website. I just, I think, provide them value, and they show they saw that. It's very, very helpful in terms of So during consideration like how to case studies, all these kind SEO and CO. of videos are very powerful. And during decision stage, yeah, so you can provide like, product reviews, product training, even share some prices, testimonials, some incentives, right? That are very powerful, because, you know those users are converting. So it's important just to understand where you are, where you are just placing your educational video or your awareness video, and where you are placing your conversion videos, which are more just aggressive, push towards sales, just FOMO click to purchase. Now we have a small inventory. You know, here's the discount is going to last for for the next 15 minutes or so. So they're trying to define a strategy, which is just supporting your marketing funnel and the state that you are right in your journey.
Andrew Maff:Interesting, the obviously we mentioned earlier about the timing of this. So it's, it's Black Friday, Eve, Eve. What is this like, a does this also tend to be, like, a really big weekend of a lot of brands doing live shopping?
Eitan Koter:Yeah, it's like crazy all over obviously, it's, we see growth across the board, both in live right? Like, some of the brands are like, they have like, 24/7 setup, for those live events, right? I think they do that specifically for Tiktok, because they want to just get more priority on the algorithm for their GMV advertising or for their organic content. So just Tiktok in the last recommendation, they suggested at least like, two hours for the algorithms to work in your favor on these live shows, right? Yeah. So some of the brands is just putting a setup some of their employees, or some of their graders, they're happy to just to discuss, you know, in front of a camera for hours, and doing this kind of a shift, and yes, we see also growth in terms of reach out to influencers like, I don't know if you're aware, like in only in the US that like 3.5 million influencers, they're, like, creating videos for brands. It's crazy. I think all of them are working this today, and they're like, various, various threshold, you know, in Tiktok, specifically for working with those influencers. But if you're a brand, you're working with on Instagram and YouTube, all these channels, you just push or anything you can because and you focus on those videos that are creating conversion. You redirect them directly to your Amazon page or DTC, or take the shot and just trying to push, push out products as far as fast as you can.
Andrew Maff:Let's, let's pivot back to Vimmi too for a second here. So obviously, you know, if I'm a brand, I want to go live on Tiktok, like I could just go onto Tiktok, go live and start to do that process. So what is it about Vimmi that really helps kind of make that experience that much better?
Eitan Koter:Yeah, so if you are just, we all know it's very, very difficult to win these days just on Tiktok or just on Meta, or just on Amazon, right? They need to have this omni channel strategy and offline we know is very, very important. So if we are assuming that omni channel is important at least, at least on the digital front, right, so you need to have the ability to stream videos, whether pre recorded, like shoppable video, long form, short form, but also live. You want to do it on a multi channel level, right? So just not only Tiktok or Instagram or Facebook, YouTube, your storefront, you need to have to deploy these videos, video assets across the board. So whether you're creating content, if it's live, yeah. So this live can be streamed, not only on a storefront across your social and YouTube, but also to Amazon, live in Walmart and just many you can just embed, just share a simple code, and your affiliates can embed this video. So just to try to expose this video in a very easy way across an ecosystem of of assets that you have, both on social marketplace, storefront, affiliate partners and etc, on the shoppable video side, there are few things that you can do. So we can connect your Tiktok to your existing Tiktok or Instagram. Just pull all your all your videos from there. We the we have in our platform, we will automatically. We have like an AI capability that's assigning or tagging products pages to those videos.
Andrew Maff:Oh, nice!
Eitan Koter:Right? And immediately you can deploy these videos on your web, on your website, as shoppable videos. So you know, you have this video carousels, or like what we call a video mall, like various sizes of video player that you can just swipe up, okay, on a web or through a mobile experience, and all those videos are shoppable, okay? And you can click and create like, what we call a video checkout. They also have, like, a chat or a comment section, even for VODs, so you can ask question within the video, and you might have a response team that can reply. So this is another scenario, just pulling a lot of videos and make them shoppable. The other scenario is, of course, once all those videos are managed on our platform, and some of our customers are creating 10s of 1000s of videos every month, right? You need, like, think about you need, like, a professional way, like a media asset management kind of thing, just to manage those terabytes of videos that should store them correctly, encrypt them, making sure that you can post them to social this is what we do, right? So we've integrated all the social channels, YouTube marketplaces into the platform so the same video can be uploaded or posted as a as a shoppable video across all these channels. So obviously we are not the video players in on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. But for example, on Meta, Instagram and Facebook, we can enable like checkout through auto DM, right? So if you just type a hot word, it will automatically identify the product. We'll send you the link to your to your chat or messenger. You can just click over there, and within the Facebook or Instagram app, you can just complete the purchase. This is just reducing the friction for users to think where to go. What? Where is the product page? You know, type the coupon code or copy paste it in certain ways. You just get a link in Instagram, you click and you check out. So that's another functionality of the API. And YouTube is working differently. We can integrate QR codes for big screens and like, and we also always in adding more and more of these, what we call destinations right just to make it more seamless for for the team, just in one click to do to enable shopability through video across all those different channels. And the last aspect is, of course, the UGC, right? It's kind of a use case that you reach out through SMS or email with a link to upload video, right? And then automatically you are becoming, like, become an affiliate, right? And think about it in a massive scale, right? A lot of consumers can, can become affiliates and and when they publish this video, or when they post this, their video testimonial, and they do it through, through an app or through a web page that we provide, they can, they can earn a commission, and we can have the ability to identify a sale and actually pay them through the process. And this is obviously happening through the through the payment mechanism of the brand, but we are integrated to his loyalty system as well just to credit those affiliates. It's another use case that we provide in the platform, and, of course, the analytics part. So you have a really omni channel like video is so powerful in terms of data, right, much more powerful than any picture or text, because we know a lot. We know from which device that the user consumed the content when it you know when it starts watching it, when it stop? Why? Why he paused, when all these pieces of information and geographies and time of the day is very, very powerful, then we give insights on demographics and user behaviors. And there's an AI that gives a lot of recommendation to improve campaign, and it's really exciting stuff that it changes, you know, by niche and by company, and this, these insights or data platform is very, very powerful in terms of just improving campaign and reaching higher conversion rates and reducing card abundant, which is obviously what everyone the bottom line is trying to do, right?
Andrew Maff:Yeah, that's awesome. Eitan really appreciate you having on the show. I know you're super busy. I don't want to take up more your time. I would love to give the floor tell everyone where they can find out more about you, and, of course, more about Vimmi.
Eitan Koter:Yeah. So Vimmi, you can just check out our website. It's vimmi.net it's vimmi.net and I'm quite active on LinkedIn you can reach at any time. Love to we love to help with any video commerce or social commerce challenge that you have.
Andrew Maff:Beautiful. Thank you, sir. Appreciate having on the show. Everyone who tuned in, of course, thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual thing, rate review, subscribe all that fun stuff on whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to the ecommshow.com to check out. All of our previous episodes, but as usual, thank you all for oining us, see you next time. Have a good one!
Narrator:Thank you for tuning in to the E comm show. Head over to Ecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTusker YouTube channel. The E comm show is brought to you by BlueTusker, a full service digital marketing company specifically for E commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth, go to bluetuskr.com now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of the E comm show you. You.
