Live Selling - Frequently Asked Questions

LiveSell is designed for selling. It lets you brand and configure engaging sales experiences that can be embedded within your site or hosted on your own domains.

Alternative livestreaming solutions or meeting platforms are not designed with selling in mind. Whilst livestreaming platforms such as YouTube Live come with delay built-in and do not allow 2-way voice and video interactivity, meetings platforms such as Zoom are not built to scale beyond a regular meeting size. Additionally, these platforms often come with 3rd party advertising or would mean your shows feature alongside your competitors. LiveSell fixes these problems.

LiveSell also opens up a huge array of integration possibilities, most notably the ability to integrate with your own website and other online ecommerce store providers such as Shopify or auction houses. This means that your show participants are able to browse and make purchases or auction bids without having to leave the live experience on both desktop and mobile devices.

And whilst LiveSell has been designed with commerce in mind, it doesn't mean you have to actually use our rooms for selling. In fact, LiveSell can be be put to use by any organisation wanting to engage with its audience in self-branded, beautifully crafted meeting spaces.

Live Video Shopping, also known as Live, Livestream or Social Shopping allows customers to engage with you and with each other in live meetings and shows during which you can make your products or services available for purchase.

With LiveSell, your customers don't have to leave the video experience to browse items or checkout. You simply make your products available on clickable badges that participants can navigate to whilst the livestream meeting or show continues in a small movable overlay.

Live auctions allow users to place bids whilst enjoying livestreamed action. Live action could be streamed from a webcam or an RTMPS feed provided by another streaming platform such as OBS Studio.

LiveSell auctions can also run alongside pre-recorded footage and receive bids around the clock. They can be configured to run as standalone, purely online events without the need for a real-person auctioneer, or as hybrid events that run alongside auctions held in physical locations where a real-person would mirror the asking prices being set by the auctioneer in the room.

100%. Being able to brand not only your meeting spaces, but also the livestream video content is at the heart of LiveSell. As well as customising the look and feel to match your brand image, we even allow you to run your meetings on your own domains.

You can save default branding that all your meeting spaces adopt automatically when you create meetings and events but in addition you can also brand specific events distinctly if you wish.

Yes. Your meeting space can host a one-to-one meeting just as perfectly as a large show with an audience size of up to a million people.

Three access links are generated when you create your virtual meeting space. It is up to you how you share your links. Links are generated for:

• Moderators with full meeting controls and able to adjust the webcam and microphone permissions of other participants.
• Broadcasters who can use their webcam and microphone but not adjust the permissions of other participants.
• Audience members who have their webcam and microphone turned off by default when joining meetings, but who could be given permission to switch them on by a moderator.

So, if you wanted to host a small meeting, you could share moderator and/or broadcaster links, whilst if you wanted to host a large audience event you might share moderator links with your main presenters and event coordinators, broadcaster links for guest speakers and audience links for your audience.

Yes - that's easy. You'll need to install the LiveSell app from the Shopify App Store and connect it to your LiveSell account. Once connected, you will be able to filter which product collections you want to make available to moderators to sell in your meeting rooms. Please see here for more answers to Shopify-specific questions.

No. LiveSell is equally well suited to hosting gatherings in online spaces that are branded as your own and accessed on your own domain where selling isn't even offered. These could be more informative or fun in nature. Where you would like to give audience members the opportunity to make purchases without your event coming across as a 'hard sell', you might want to host more passive events but where the opportunity to buy still might exist by way of clickable buy badges appearing alongside the main broadcast.

Absolutely. When your audience click a link to join your event we know whether to give them an experience that is optimised for small mobile screens or whether to offer them the full desktop experience. LiveSell works in web browsers on iOS and Android mobile devices in just the same way as it works on desktops which means that neither you nor your audience need to install an app.

As a seller, we would recommend that you use a webcam connected to a desktop device to broadcast your video so that the audience experience is as smooth as possible. However, if you need to broadcast from a mobile, it'll work with best-of-breed audio and video quality - it will be down to you to ensure your hand is nice and steady!

We don't impose caps on the length of your meetings, but you might want to consider only allowing meetings and events to run if there is a moderator present. This way you can ensure that there are no unforeseen costs.

LiveSell is FREE to use for up to 1000 video and audio minutes combined per month. One video minute is counted as one person subscribing to a video stream for one minute, and one audio minute is counted as one person subscribing to one audio stream for one minute. So if you had 3 people connecting to single broadcaster video stream for 30 minutes and their audio-only stream for 15 minutes, that would count as 135 combined minutes. A free subscription is capped at 1000 combined video/audio minutes per month, 1GB of video storage and audience sizes of up to 10 per room.

To remove usage caps and increase video storage and audience size limits you need to upgrade to a PRO subscription. This costs $399/month and includes up to 10,000 minutes/month of video minutes AND up to 10,000 minutes/month of audio minutes respectively, up to 100GB of video storage and audiences sizes of up to 1000 per room. Additional video minutes cost $0.005/min and additional audio minutes cost $0.002/min. A paid subscription can be cancelled at any time.

Video storage can be taken up by recordings and uploaded shoppable videos. As a rough guide, 1 hour of mp4 video saved at the recommended 2mbps (megabits per second) requires just under 1GB (1000MB) of storage.

If you would like to: remove audience size limits, enjoy unlimited video storage, want access to our advanced streaming features, have bespoke feature or integration requests, wish to gain access to our APIs and/or require 24/7 dedicated support, please contact us to discuss an enterprise partnership.

No. Just register and start creating rooms. You don't even need to set your own branding if you don't want to.

If you're using a desktop, all you need is a webcam and microphone. If you're using a smartphone or tablet, the cam and mic are built in. You can also use streaming software such as OBS Studio to send RTMPS streams into LiveSell in place of a webcam.

You can either add products directly and link them to existing websites and checkout pages, or, if you already use Shopify for your online store, you can connect directly to your Shopify inventory by installing LiveSell as a Shopify app and following the simple instructions.

When creating your meeting or event you are able to decide whether your audience have access to chat and seeing other participants.

You are also able to decide whether moderators have to approve chat messages before they are visible to other participants.

Yes. LiveSell is all about interactivity. Whilst audience members join events with their cam and mic turned off by default and type chat messages to communicate, moderators are able to give permission to individual participants to start (and stop) streaming their cam and/or mic during an event should they wish.

Yes. You are able to record your LiveSell events and opt to make them public if you wish. You could use past recordings as your "Moderator not present" video that is shown to users entering rooms that have been configured to need a moderator in order for interactivity between participants to be enabled.