The creator economy is flooded with more creators and brands daily, making traditional creator income streams, like brand deals and affiliate marketing, more challenging to build. For creators interested in boosting their earnings, the rise of live selling may be critical to long-term, sustainable online success.

CommentSold is a leading live selling brand in North America, providing small to mid-sized brands with solutions for live video commerce experiences. Recently, the company expanded its offerings with Popshoplive, an all-in-one live selling platform allowing creators to grow their income and access critical data insights. According to data from CommentSold, live sales can increase creator revenue by 200% in less than six months.

Keep reading to learn about live selling’s impact on the influencer economy with insights from Dan Dan Li, Founder of Popshoplive and Chief Innovation Officer at CommentSold. 

How Live Selling Is Creating New Income Streams For Creators With Dan Dan Li, Founder Of Popshoplive And Chief Innovation Officer Of CommentSold

The Creation of Popshoplive by CommentSold

Dan Dan shares, “At the time, I was building a peer-to-peer marketplace for e-commerce, and one of our challenges was helping sellers tell their stories and helping the customers connect to the sellers more on a peer-to-peer or human-to-human level.”

After noticing the interest in short-form video, Dan Dan spoke with her team about creating interactive live streaming technology to provide this innovation in storytelling within the creator economy. 

Interactive live streaming has multiple benefits over TV shopping or e-commerce. 

For example, customers can receive validation from live streamers when they shop, which enhances the user experience. Community building and real-time engagement are two other benefits that Popshoplive boasts, differentiating them from other live streaming platforms and improving the customer experience. 

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Making a Living as a Creator

A recent study by Mavrck found that 51% of creators make less than $500 monthly despite the boom in the creator economy. This startling statistic differs from what many expect when seeing content creators’ affluent lifestyles online. 

Dan Dan shares that the lack of monetization tools and strategy contributes to this phenomenon. Creators are incredibly good at their craft but need access to the right tools and data to monetize their channels successfully. 

She explains, “They’re very underserved with the tools for community management. They might have a passive following, but there are really no tools for them to act proactively to manage their community. I think live streaming is a very efficient way for creators to manage all their important components.”

Live streaming data provides creators with critical information about their conversion rate – how many viewers do they prompt to purchase a product? This figure can even help them negotiate better brand deals because they can demonstrate their financial impact. 

Popshoplive gives creators full data ownership, empowering them to build their businesses with KPIs.

How Will Live Selling Impact Traditional Brand Deals and Affiliate Marketing?

Traditional creator revenue streams, like affiliate marketing and brand deals, are staples for earning money online. However, these streams can be shaky, especially as competition rises in the creator economy. 

Dan Dan shares, “I think the mission for all the tech companies should be removing the agency, the middlemen, and the black box by creating efficiency and transparency, like offering a direct monetization platform for creators to manage their community. This means they can remove the manager in between or even remove the brand in between the brand deals.”

By eliminating the middleman, more creators can earn money faster and have greater control over their earnings because they can pick brands that are authentic to their content and community. Instead of waiting for brands or a manager to reach out to them, creators can immediately dive into making money with live selling. 

The integration between CommentSold and Popshoplive is also crucial because it’s the first platform to handle all shipping features for creators, leaving creators only responsible for fostering engagement and community. Creators don’t need to worry about inventory, freeing up their time to make more content. 

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Live Selling Case Studies

CommentSold has enabled many businesses and creators to grow their revenue exponentially. 

Fashion retailer Drop The Walls utilized live selling in the United States successfully. Through lifetime live selling, the company achieved over $25 million in revenue while simplifying invoicing and operations, improving the customer experience. 

Another significant case study highlights Bad Addiction Boutique. This fashion retailer harnessed the power of social channels and live selling to hit a massive 1.8x increase in month-over-month Gross Merchandise Value (GMV). This switch to live selling grew their sales to over one million dollars in August 2023 alone. 

Additionally, sustainable fashion brand Timeless Threads experienced huge returns when they tripled their revenue through live selling on platforms like CommentSold. Sarah Bertram, the owner of Timeless Threads, began selling on social media but found that embracing live selling helped showcase her personality and brand more, leading to a much bigger sales volume. 

The Future of Live Selling

In five years, Dan Dan predicts that platforms with the best user experience will be able to stay in the game and outlive technology companies with less user-friendly experiences. 

She explains, “It’s really about how the live streaming format can further enrich what will be enabled by creators and how can we also have a deep supply catalog, which is what our job shipping feature is helping to solve.”

Dan Dan wants to bring more creative minds into the mix to build more innovative, interactive live-streaming experiences, which will help Popshoplive stay on top of the constantly changing creator economy. 

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The Most Pressing Challenges and Opportunities in the Creator Economy

Along with the need for creators to diversify their income streams, Dan Dan shares that creators often have no idea of their impact on sales – a huge challenge that complicates building a sustainable creator business. 

Many brands don’t share sales figures with creators during sponsorships, so creators don’t have the tools to measure their conversion. Figures like brand awareness are also challenging to measure, making this a pressing challenge for brands and creators. 

The Future of PopShoplive

Dan Dan says, “We want to empower small to medium businesses and creators in the economy, but I believe that a big part of the people who are going to benefit from live streaming – a lot of them will be women entrepreneurs. The people who are doing great with live streaming tend to have a caring character. They can read the room and can create and scale deep emotional connections with hundreds and thousands of people.”

Popshoplive will continue releasing new tools to help these entrepreneurs scale their businesses and reach. In addition, the team is working to help more entrepreneurs work from anywhere with their innovations so that entrepreneurs can balance a healthy career and family life.