The Business of Fashion
Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.
Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.
Brazil’s B2W Digital is partnering with UK-based video e-commerce specialists, OOOOO, to scale its burgeoning livestream e-commerce business.
OOOOO launched in 2020 and is the brainchild of former general director of Wish, Sam Jones, and former TikTok CTO, Eric Zhang. The platform’s offering of shoppable video content aims to widen the reach of livestream e-commerce beyond its current stronghold in China, to other parts of the world.
B2W Digital was born out of a merger between Americanas.com and Submarino.com 15 years ago and currently offers more than 99 million products from 96,000 sellers. B2W also owns the Shoptime and Soubarato platforms.
In June 2020, B2W launched Americanas Ao Vivo, a livestreaming e-commerce service similar to OOOOO, which the company says yielded seven times more conversions than the site’s average.
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Leonardo Rocha, B2W Digital’s marketing director, is hopeful this new partnership “will help scale this business front for B2W, offering more autonomy for content creation and a world of possibilities in entertainment and purchases directly on the app.”
OOOOO co-founder, Sam Jones, described Brazil as “one of the most interesting e-commerce markets in the world,” due to its high mobile penetration and B2W’s vast product offering.
“If you combine the creativity of the young, burgeoning Brazilian market with B2W’s immense stock of beauty and fashion products, the resulting live videos will be incredibly engaging with a high conversion rate,” he told BoF.
Brazil is already the largest e-commerce market in Latin America. From 2018 to 2020, online shopping revenue doubled, reaching 126.3 billion Brazilian reais ($24.11 billion) last year, with mobile commerce generating most of that revenue, according to Statista.
Local streetwear brands, festivals and stores selling major global labels remain relatively small but the country’s community of hypebeasts and sneakerheads is growing fast.
This week’s round-up of global markets fashion business news also features Senegalese investors, an Indian menswear giant and workers’ rights in Myanmar.
Though e-commerce reshaped retailing in the US and Europe even before the pandemic, a confluence of economic, financial and logistical circumstances kept the South American nation insulated from the trend until later.
This week’s round-up of global markets fashion business news also features Korean shopping app Ably, Kenya’s second-hand clothing trade and the EU’s bid to curb forced labour in Chinese cotton.