For years, I thought live shopping was one of those retail trends that worked in Asia but probably wouldn’t translate to Australia. I was wrong.
Live shopping has been enormous across parts of Asia for years. China took the concept to another level, with hosts demonstrating products, answering questions and selling to audiences watching live on their phones. But whenever I looked at it through an Australian lens, I struggled to see the same opportunity. We had seen Australian retailers experiment with live shopping, but it never really seemed to take off. My assumption was that there were cultural differences at play. Maybe Australian consumers simply didn’t want to shop that way.
Then I started watching what was happening elsewhere.
What exactly is live shopping?
At its simplest, live shopping combines livestreaming, entertainment and e-commerce. Think of a television shopping channel, except it is interactive, mobile and happening in an environment where the audience can participate in real time.
A host presents products live. Customers can ask questions, make comments, request to see particular products and purchase or bid while they watch. There can be auctions, limited releases, countdowns, product reveals and other mechanics that create urgency and make the experience feel more like entertainment than browsing a traditional product page.
That entertainment element is important. The best live shopping isn’t simply someone standing in front of a camera reading product specifications. It is shopping, content and community happening at the same time. And increasingly, it isn’t just happening in Asia.
I must stress that the biggest difference and most powerful aspect is the interactivity. Viewers can type comments; everyone sees what they say, and the sellers interact with those comments. It’s what makes live shopping so interesting and fun for a shopper.
The Australian Landscape
In Australia, the two platforms worth knowing are Whatnot and eBay Live. Whatnot arrived first and has built much of its audience around categories such as trading cards, collectibles, comics and toys. eBay Live is much newer, officially launching here in December 2025 with an initial focus on trading cards and collectable toys, another indication of just how naturally these categories fit the live shopping model.
Perhaps surprisingly, one major player that hasn’t arrived in Australia is TikTok Shop. Despite becoming a significant shopping platform in markets such as the US, UK and Southeast Asia, TikTok Shop is still not available to Australian consumers. Australian brands can use TikTok to reach customers and can even use TikTok Shop to expand into overseas markets, but the full in-app shopping experience hasn’t been launched here yet.
That means Australia’s live shopping market is still relatively young. We can already see global platforms investing locally, while one of the biggest forces in live commerce globally is still sitting on the sidelines. If TikTok Shop eventually launches here, it could be another significant step in bringing live shopping into the Australian mainstream.
I also suspect that this creates an opportunity for early sellers as eBay and Whatnot are in a land rush to onboard sellers with generous deals, including promotional exposure. When TikTok Shop launches, it will need to offer something special to onboard sellers already established on other platforms.
The US changed my thinking
Over the past few years, I started seeing live shopping gain traction in the United States. Whatnot, which began with a strong focus on collectibles, has grown into a major live commerce platform across hundreds of categories. eBay has been investing in eBay Live, while TikTok continues to bring content and commerce closer together.
Then earlier this year I travelled to Shoptalk in Las Vegas. Whatnot had a live shopping stage operating on the expo floor, TikTok was showcasing live commerce, and sellers were broadcasting and selling products while thousands of retailers walked around them.
Seeing it happening in person changed my perspective. This wasn’t an Asian retail curiosity anymore; live shopping was developing in another major Western retail market. We are also seeing the model develop across Europe. Suddenly the Australian experience started to look less like evidence that live shopping didn’t work and more like evidence that perhaps we had simply tried it too early. The audience, platforms and sellers may not have been ready yet.
Why toys and collectibles are leading the way
One of the most interesting things about watching live shopping develop overseas is the categories where it has gained traction first. Collectibles, trading cards and toys feature heavily, and that makes sense when you think about how people engage with these products.
Collecting has never been purely transactional. Collectors talk about products, show each other what they have found, trade, compare, hunt for rare items and speculate about what is coming next. Live shopping takes many of those behaviours and puts them into a retail environment. A traditional e-commerce page is great when someone knows exactly what they want. Live shopping becomes particularly powerful when discovery is part of the experience.
That could be watching someone open a blind box and waiting to see what is inside, opening a packet of trading cards live and discovering whether there is a rare card, or seeing a limited-edition collectible appear unexpectedly in a stream. There is suspense, scarcity and an audience reacting alongside you. Importantly, there is also a person on screen who understands the category and can interact with the audience. That is a very different experience from typing the name of a collectible into a search box.
It also explains why community matters so much. People aren’t necessarily watching a one-hour live stream because they need to buy something immediately – they are there because they enjoy the category. Shopping becomes part of the entertainment. Whatnot is perhaps the clearest example. The platform started around collectibles and has since expanded dramatically, but trading cards, Pokémon, toys and other collectible categories continue to play an important role in live selling.
The growth of products such as Labubu, blind boxes and other character collectibles demonstrates another advantage. These products naturally contain an element of surprise and discovery, which makes them incredibly social products. Someone opening a blind box on their own is one experience. Watching someone open one live while hundreds of collectors react, discuss it and potentially bid for it creates something very different.
Toys have another significant advantage over many retail categories: they are demonstrable. A retailer or brand can play with a toy, build the LEGO set, race the car, open the pack, compare two products or answer a parent’s question about how something works. That ability to demonstrate and entertain at the same time makes toys particularly suited to live commerce.
Australia is starting to move
When I returned from the US, I wanted Australian retailers to see live shopping rather than just hear someone talk about it. So, at our Retail Community Online Retailer After Dark event in Sydney, we decided to run a live shopping experiment.
Working with eBay Live and experienced live sellers Brad and Jazz, we turned part of the event into a live charity sale. Retailers and brands donated products, the proceeds went to Heart Kids, and Brad and Jazz sold the products live to people both inside the venue and watching around Australia.
The format was incredibly fast. Products could move through auctions in seconds, viewers were bidding against each other in real time, and the hosts had to understand the products, watch the audience and keep the entire experience moving. In around an hour, approximately $4,500 worth of donated products were sold.
But the number wasn’t the most interesting part for me. It was watching the retailers in the room. Most of the people I spoke with had never actually watched a live shopping session before. They may have heard about live commerce or read about its growth overseas, but seeing the mechanics up close made the concept much easier to understand.
If you haven’t experienced live shopping before, we filmed the experiment, including interviews before and after the sale.
The toy opportunity goes beyond new products
For toy retailers and brands, I think there are several different use cases worth considering. New releases and limited editions are obvious, as are collectibles and trading cards, but clearance may be just as interesting.
During our live event, Brad and Jazz explained that live sellers can move through huge volumes of product very quickly. In one previous stream they had sold more than 180 items, and they suggested 70 or 80 items can be sold in an hour. That potentially creates another tool for retailers dealing with discontinued ranges, fragmented inventory, samples or products that aren’t moving through traditional channels.
Then there is product education. There are plenty of toys that are difficult to sell from a static image and a few bullet points. Put the product in someone’s hands, demonstrate it and answer questions about it, and suddenly the value can become much easier to understand. Live commerce gives retailers and brands the ability to demonstrate that value at scale.
Being late isn’t necessarily bad
Australia is behind. Asia is far ahead of us in live commerce; the US is further along the adoption curve and Europe is moving as well. But being late has an advantage: we don’t have to invent the model.
We can watch what categories work overseas, see which platforms gain traction, learn what successful hosts do differently and understand what makes people watch a live shopping stream rather than scroll past it. Most importantly, we can see that the businesses succeeding aren’t simply putting someone in front of a camera and waiting for customers to appear. They are combining retail with entertainment, expertise and community.
That may ultimately be the biggest lesson. Live shopping shouldn’t necessarily be viewed as just another e-commerce sales channel. It sits somewhere between retail, social media, content, entertainment and community.
A few years ago, I thought live shopping was probably an Asian phenomenon. After watching it develop through Asia, then the US and Europe, seeing it firsthand overseas and finally experimenting with it here in Australia, I’ve changed my mind.
Australia looks increasingly like it is following the same global adoption curve, just a little later. The good news is that being behind gives us the chance to learn from everyone who went first.
For toy retailers and brand leaders, that makes it worth considering as part of your strategy.
Dean Salakas is a retail leader, entrepreneur and advisor with more than 25 years of experience across retail, e-commerce and technology. A former CEO of The Party People, he was named the Australian Retailers Association’s Retail Leader of the Year and received the 2025 Online Retail Industry Awards Industry Recognition Award. Today, Dean is Co-Founder and CEO of Retail Community, one of Australia’s largest and most active retail networks, and works with retailers, brands and technology businesses as an advisor and consultant.
This article also appeared in Edition 22 of The Toy Universe Magazine
