What Is a Livestream Shopping Application?

Livestream shopping results from the convergence of video streaming, influence marketing, and e-commerce. Livestream retail describes a method of doing business in which retailers, influencers, and brands advertise and sell things using the medium of live streams. These sessions may well be held via a social media channel, a smartphone website, a platform, or marketplace.

The Evolution of Livestream Shopping

Live shopping, often known as live commerce, is a revolution in e-commerce that started in China and has now expanded to other countries. This experience of online shopping in a market-like style may be traced back to Taobao Live, which debuted in 2016 on the app developed by Alibaba. Livestreaming and shopping were brought together for the first time in China thanks to a project that Alibaba Group spearheaded. The channel was designed to engage, entertain, and educate consumers about new trends.

The Global Ascent of Live Shopping

Over the last few years, the recognition of live-shopping platforms has increased to the point that it has expanded beyond the boundaries of certain regions and into every corner of the world. Amidst the rise of digital-first retail practices and intensifying rivalry among companies, livestream shopping has established a solid presence in the industry.
The exponential growth of the metaverse adds further weight to the compelling argument that live commerce has enormous untapped potential as a core sales channel. As an early indicator, Samsung released its most recent product, the Samsung Galaxy S22, in a completely virtual setting.

Advantages of Livestream Shopping for Brands and Retailers
The worldwide live commerce ecosystem has had a number of noteworthy events over the course of the last few years. Companies of various sizes, including industry heavyweights such as Google, Pinterest, Twitter, and TikTok, as well as start-up businesses, have all experimented with this novel method of selling products and services. But what specific advantages does shoppable video streaming provide for these businesses?

Conversion rate increase

Greater sales are driven due to the enhanced convenience of real-time shopping. As stated by McKinsey, firms claim conversion rates that are on average 30% higher during live shopping events. In 2021, conventional e-commerce in the United States only reached 2.8%.
Improving brand appeal and differentiation
Additionally, companies are getting into the livestreaming game to improve their brand image. The technology enables businesses and retailers to have real-time conversations with customers, giving the impression that the brands are more accessible to the target audience.

Authenticity

Livestream shopping delivers the brand right to the customer’s smartphone without requiring video editing or photoshopping. It implies that clients get an unedited picture of the actual goods and that when they make a purchase, it appears precisely the same as it did on live stream. Because of this, live events provide the impression that corporations are genuine and focused on people. This advantage is essential for contemporary organizations since 90% of customers consider authenticity the most important consideration when choosing a brand.

Engagement in real time

The audience participation and the unpredictability of the livestreaming both contribute to the excitement of live shopping. Because users may post comments and ask questions in real time during live shopping, viewers are more involved in the purchasing experience.

Entertainment

Livestream shopping combines the worlds of commerce and live video entertainment to provide an experience that is more pleasant and diverse than traditional shopping. More likely, this one-of-a-kind combination of genuine rapport, shopping, and an enjoyable experience will fulfill the requirements of 31% of customers in the United States who are ready to spend extra for an unparalleled shopping experience.
In-store activities such as quizzes, challenges, and unpacking sessions may contribute to the gamification of live shopping by appealing to customers’ natural desire to play.

Immersive experience

Live videos allow businesses to add multimodal interactions that can help them develop a good emotional relationship with a consumer. These interactions have a characteristic known as immersiveness, and they present themselves as a blend of extended reality and flat user interfaces. Immersive-first technologies like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), for example, may create an even deeper level of immersion and display a product from any angle.

Top 5 Livestream Shopping Applications

Even though the host and the goods are quite important, the software is the channel that connects your business with the clients. In order to provide you with a more in-depth understanding of what live-shopping software entails, we have compiled a list of the top choices available to assist companies in selling their stock live.

TalkShopLive

This app for live streaming is marketed as a robust platform for live streaming and home shopping. TalkShopLive is a famous platform with top celebrities and brands. It enables anybody to sell live by establishing their own channel. Customers can be converted into buyers via integrations, in-platform purchasing, and automated fulfillment.

Bambuser

This livestreaming app was founded in Sweden, another network with significant promise for live shopping. Since 2007, Bambuser has addressed the requirements of retailers, global brands, and enterprises by simplifying the selling process and making it more personal and engaging.

Channelize

Channelize, a complete e-commerce solution for B2C companies, is yet another option on our list of livestream shoppable platforms. Channelize allows businesses to engage customers in real-time by enabling seamless integration, scalable APIs, SDKs, and user interface kits. These features all help to reinforce a company’s brand image.

Livescale

Livescale is a live commerce startup that allows companies to generate awareness and revenue using a personalized and branded experience for their customers. The product feed synchronizing, integrated adoption, easy checkout integration, and complex first-party analytics are some of the defining aspects of the features.

Amazon Live

Amazon, which has the dominant position in the retail industry, was one of the pioneers in starting this trend. Since 2016, Amazon Live has assisted companies in showcasing their items, promoting those products, and engaging with their target audience in real-time. Through the use of the Amazon Live Creator app, businesses have the opportunity to begin live-streaming on Amazon. This tool assists in the production of live streams, the same as their capture and management.

To Sum Up

People’s shopping habits are shifting due to the increasing prevalence of digital technologies in today’s environment. They are no longer in need of, or interested in, shopping at traditional stores. Rather, shopping online has become the norm in the society that has emerged after the pandemic.
In the last several years, it has been abundantly clear that emotion, contact, and dialogue are all quite important for companies. Without these elements, organizations can only compete with one another to see who can provide the lowest price, and Amazon is already in the lead in this competition. Therefore, the only way to achieve organic sales in the digital age is to provide a more humanized experience.
Livestream shopping, on the other hand, gives a more personal feel to the product or service by combining elements of digital, interactive, and social. Because of all these factors, live shopping is now very marketable, with improved conversions and enhanced brand awareness.

Orangesoft will assist you in embracing the live streaming future of retail and will simplify this process. Please get in contact with us, and we will collaborate on the development of a cutting-edge livestream shopping app.

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As the experience of telecommunications giant Nokia shows, this creates opportunities and challenges for enterprises to serve their customers. The Finnish company recently began using Microsoft Azure Arc, a platform for managing and multi-cloud environments, taking a key step in its quest to serve customers in the new environment.

The journey to Azure Arc began in 2016, when Nokia launched its Analytics, Virtualization and Automation (AVA) system, an artificial intelligence-based analytics platform. The company developed the system to help its customers — cellular carriers — use data to improve operational efficiency, increase revenue and provide a better user experience for their customers. Until then, Nokia engineers had been inputting data into spreadsheets and using manual data processing techniques for analytics. This approach was inefficient, error-prone and unsuitable for processing large amounts of data.

“Given the significant increase in performance and network size, that path was no longer acceptable,” says Paolo Tornaghi, who heads the technology and architecture group in Nokia’s advanced business applications services division. – We needed scalable applications for customers.”

The AVA system uses data from network operations and other sources to draw inferences from artificial intelligence and find solutions to workflow problems. In 2019, Nokia moved AVA to the cloud. The move to Azure gave Nokia the ability to offer AI-powered analytics through AVA to customers around the world without having to manage separate cloud services.

Using the cloud provided immediate benefits, but as Nokia began to scale AVA, new needs arose. For some customers, specific regulatory requirements suggested the need to store data internally, while other customers wanted to use AVA in other public or private clouds rather than the Nokia cloud.

Azure Arc allows users to manage distributed environments in on-premises, edge and multi-cloud environments.

Developing customized solutions for individual customers wasn’t feasible, and Nokia needed to find a way to deploy its AVA services in a unified way across any Kubernetes builds that customers were using.

“That became a problem for us. We couldn’t offer AVA to our customers who had those limitations. We had to do something about it,” says Kalyanjit Gogoi, head of research and development for Nokia’s advanced business application services. – That’s a problem we put to Microsoft and asked, “How do we deal with it?” It’s a very close partnership. We develop many of our solutions together.”

Microsoft’s engineering team worked closely with Nokia to integrate Azure Arc with AVA and develop the flexible, scalable infrastructure management solution customers need. Azure Arc, launched in 2019, enables resource design in Azure and centralizes the management of the company’s multi-cloud and on-premises technologies, from data centers to peripherals. For Nokia, the implementation of Azure Arc means that the company can manage and control AVA applications that run on customer-preferred cloud services while complying with data requirements in different countries. Sensitive data stays in the customer’s cloud and is not transferred anywhere.

The new Azure Arc-enabled AVA architecture consists of two parts: the Nokia-owned Azure subscription cloud, where AVA applications and tasks are concentrated, and the Kubernetes stack-enabled client cloud, on which Nokia deploys and supports its AVA applications. The two clouds communicate over a secure channel.

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Building services above the base tier is more difficult. You need to be sure that all services, not just yours, are up and running. An example is a PaaS that runs on a Kubernetes infrastructure, namely the master node group, on which the management plane functions: kube-apiserver, scheduler, controller-manager and database. They manage the Kubernetes cluster and distribute the load. There is also a group of worker nodes on which these workloads are executed.

When the Kubernetes container starts up, the latter “runs” on one of these nodes. Communication begins: the masters join together in a quorum, exchanging data. The wizard also communicates with the vorkers and tells them what to do, and what to do if any of the nodes break. Everything happens inside the network, and such a cluster has a load balancer that distributes traffic to the master nodes.

We can’t just deploy Kubernetes on top of the infrastructure via Terraform, this process is hard to control. Something can go wrong and we can’t react quickly. And we need to react, so we have a consistent process that looks like this:

This is a flowchart of creating a Kubernetes cluster in a cloud infrastructure. Some steps and branching are omitted, but the general logic is like this:

• Initialize, create and configure the network
• Create and configure the master node
• Configure the management plane
• Create and start the worker node
• Reconfigure and start up the remaining resources
• Test availability and release the cluster to the client

How did we test?

There’s such a thing as a test pyramid, it shows the ratio of tests in the project. At the bottom are Unit-Tests, which should be the majority, then come Integration Tests, then End-to-end, Functional and other tests. They are more expensive to write and run, but you need less of them because almost everything is covered by Unit-tests. That’s exactly the scheme we started with.

It turned out that most popular methods don’t suit our project because it is based on distributed sequential processes executed asynchronously.

What disadvantages did we find?

Let’s analyze each type of tests separately:

Unit tests: generally good, but there are nuances. First – they don’t allow us to cover a multi-step process. Second, because of the specifics of our processes Unit-tests are often inefficient: we don’t have any individual small functions, but we do have domain logic. We develop services as part of domain driven design, and the logic is combined around domains and aggregators. For each step we have to prepare the state of the domain, then perform the step and run tests. Unit tests don’t lend themselves well to DDD, because in our case DDD is very much about working with states. Can this be covered by integration tests?

Integration tests have pros, but there are obvious cons. They are expensive to run and not well suited for logic testing. An integration test is good to write when it is the interaction with the database that must be tested. There is a fixed number of SQL-queries, and we write a test for each of them. But a large number of logical operations leads to branching of scenarios. Conducting an integration test for each of them is long and expensive, hard to write and maintain.

End-to-end tests. They are good, but they are also long and difficult to write. Such tests are hard to maintain: every time the services change, you need to change the tests too. The frequency of change is roughly equal to the number of tests multiplied by the number of services. In addition, it is almost impossible to raise the entire environment at once. If your service is running a virtualization infrastructure – you can’t just emulate that infrastructure, you have to run virtual machines and networks, which is expensive and not always possible.

And what about API tests, you ask? There’s an ambiguity here: our API is quite thin, there are some rest entities that the frontend works with, and behind them there’s a layer of technical, infrastructure and business logic that changes faster than the API. In addition, not everything works through the API – there are some processes inside the service: autoscaling, autohealing, working with persistent volume.

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I have divided the scanner’s work into the following steps:

• Checking open ports, detecting running services and OS.
• Vulnerability detection.
• Security assessment.
• Writing a report.
• Exploitation of a vulnerability (requires permission from the administrator of the system being scanned, as it may result in a security breach).

Scanning types

Vulnerability scanning is one of the initial stages of the penetration testing (pentest) task. Vulnerability scanning, like pentest or any testing, can be divided into several types. Let’s look at each through the lens of a vulnerability scanner:

WhiteBox. The scanner is executed inside the analyzed network, which enables a more complete and complex study of vulnerabilities, there is no need to “guess” the type of service or operating system. The advantage of this method is in its full and complex approach to investigation, but its disadvantage is that it is less close to a real attack of an intruder.

BlackBox. “BlackBox. The scanner is run from outside the network under investigation, which makes it necessary to work through publicly accessible interfaces. The application needs to analyze the open ports, “guess” the services, and detect vulnerabilities based on the information obtained. This variant is as close to the real situation as possible: the scanner has only the IP or domain name to check as the initial data. On the downside, you might mention that the applications used in the DMZ will remain undetected.

Of course, you can argue for a long time about the pros and cons of different types of scanning, but hardly anyone will argue against the necessity of testing. And practice shows that the combination of both methods yields the best results. It seems to me that it makes more sense to first do the BlackBox scan and then the WhiteBox scan. By the way, we are now working on creating a service for clients, which will allow us to check the infrastructure located in the Cloud4Y data center using BlackBox scanning. The service will save from unpleasant accidents when due to human error ports were not closed or other potentially dangerous “holes” were left.

Selecting the product – the basis for service

In order to select a product intelligently, you need to set criteria that it must meet:

Mandatory:

• Free or limited to a paid version that fits the parameters.
• High-quality search of open ports.
• Works with IP addresses.
• Looks for vulnerabilities – CVE base references, CVSS metrics threat level or similar.
• Flexible customization.
• Report output.

Optional:

• Availability of technical documentation, technical forums.
• GUI.
• Output of the report in a convenient format.
• Sending results to email.
• API.

Not every product on the market complies with such a set of criteria, especially in the segment of free software, but the task is there and we will find a solution. Let’s analyze what is fashionable nowadays in IS circles as free solutions. After searching and analyzing the solutions we have chosen several products to investigate:

• OpenVas.
• Tenable Nessus.
• Gobysec / Goby.
• Tsunami-security-scanner.
• Flan Scan.
• D9scan.
• Rustscan.
• Owasp ZAP.
• W9Scan.
• Nmap.

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