A surprising number of brands, especially in Southeast Asia, have adopted Live Commerce on platforms like TikTok and Shopee, but they have no quality control.

L’Oreal recently announced that, following their success in Indonesia, they had launched their own Live Commerce Studios in Vietnam.

We first tracked a L’Oreal brand stream in Vietnam 2 years ago (so the studios may be new, but the channel is not). The medium was young, brands were figuring it out, and they are to be commended for stepping up to the plate in multiple countries in SEA and putting down a flag as one of the first major brand groups to do so. They have received attention for building studios in Indonesia and when Vismay Sharma recently announced they’d done the same in Vietnam – I was excited to see how they have progressed. We re-followed some of their accounts and took a look at what they are doing now. The results are pretty shocking at the most basic level.

Honestly, many brands in Southeast Asia have a “silence problem” – so it is not that we are “picking on them” but after over two years, and when you’re committing to the channel with capital expenditure, I don’t understand how brand managers aren’t watching the output and demanding better performance.

This video includes similar issues on streams in the last few months from Unilever, Kimberly-Clark, Wardah Beauty and SC Johnson.

On Douyin 70% of all livestreams are from merchants/brands – understanding and scaling this medium is a core skill set of the future of retail.

Why This Matters:

We looked at streams and their silence levels that we tracked in Indonesia to understand the impact of silence and the results are pretty telling:

A series of graphs illustrating the impact of silence on key live metrics, including unique viewers, likes, and new followers per hour, with data points plotted against silent duration percentages.
A chart depicting the impact of silence on key live metrics in livestreaming, showing performance metrics such as viewers per hour, total viewers, likes per hour, comments per hour, shares per hour, and new followers per hour categorized by silence group percentages.

These graphics, put together from analysis on over 7000 hours of Live Commerce streams in Indonesia clearly show that where streams have large amounts of silence, the number of viewers, likes, follows etc were significantly down (roughly 30% on all key metrics across the board). When you are going live to sell products, this obviously has a trickle down effect, less viewers and less interactions means less people watching and ultimately buying your products.

Stickler was built to manage this process, make it easier to go live at scale and ensure that your hosts are doing what they need to do. We have tools from auto-reporting, brand safety, host and moderation tools & AI assistance to help you monitor and manage everything.

Just being Live is not enough. Tiktok Shop, Shopee and other live channels are about discovery, attention and engagement, which all ultimately lead to sales. If your hosts are just sitting there, playing on their phone, doing their email, or whatever it is they are doing, they are not engaging your audience. If you are not engaging the audience, then I don’t understand what you are doing it for.

Get in touch with Stickler if you have been tasked with establishing (or fixing) Live Commerce for your business or client. Our technology and reporting tools are built to help you scale Live Commerce and if you are struggling with where to start then we can help with that too. hello@Stickler.live