The Future of E-commerce is Interactive — Why We’re Backing Reactive

Recall, for a moment, the catalogs of the early 2000’s. Maybe it’s just the season, but I vividly remember hunting party city’s Halloween catalog line by line in search of the perfect costume. When it got chillier, I’d flip through L.L. Bean’s winter offering, cutting out my top picks for a hefty Christmas wish list. What’s funny, is that despite a bonafide e-commerce revolution, digitized product pages and SKU lists have remained almost identical to their paper counterparts. You have the item in question, the sizes or shades it comes in, and a few artful product shots to click through. Slightly more engaging components have made their way onto product pages, like carefully filtered customer reviews and embedded social posts from their most aesthetic fans. But unfortunately, the vast majority of e-commerce sites suffer the same problem their retro paper ancestors did: they fail to convert 99% of potential customers. In short, the e-commerce revolution has, in many senses, simply copy and pasted the customer experience of the 90’s and early aughts into today’s world.

Perhaps the reason the storefront has been neglected for so long is because, for a while, brands could reliably get in front of customers via social media instead. Another way of looking at this is that brands could acquire customers by platform chasing: building successive audiences on whichever platform was en vogue (while treating their storefront as a no-frills shopping cart). But with each new platform comes the almost ground-hog-day-like task of building up a new audience. Say you started with Facebook when it was all the rage, amassed a huge following, only to have Instagram, then YouTube then TikTok gain prominence. Each time a new platform emerges, brands are faced with the costly task of building up a platform specific persona that perfectly conveys their brand voice without, of course, seeming like they’re trying too hard.

Yet when we take a step back, what’s gained by building a following on Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok? Assuming you’ve been able to game another company’s opaque algorithm, you’ve gotten in front of many sets of eyeballs, and perhaps even built out a lake of potential customers. But conversion across social media has fallen off in recent years. For starters, brands have never owned their follower’s data first party — the platform has, and the platform likely always will. Then there’s advertising, which isn’t what it used to be. It’s never been more expensive to advertise on social platforms, with CAC as much as 5x higher. Facebook’s new ads model is driving even lower quality traffic, and the changes made with iOS 14 and iOS 16 have also massively increased CAC across social platforms.

Without doubt, social media is an incredible layer upon which to build an audience, but when it comes to owning the customer relationship directly, it’s seriously lacking. Which is unfortunate, because forming, and deepening, a 1st party customer relationship is exponentially more valuable and efficient than putting out massive amounts of content to a relatively passive audience. For years, social media was certainly the primary channel for customer conversion, but a confluence of factors is forcing merchants to shift their efforts elsewhere. And there’s no better place to route, and engage with, customers than a merchant’s own site, albeit with updates.

And boy are updates needed! Say you keep seeing this brand, first on Instagram, then in a TikTok video, finally in a YouTube tutorial, so you go through the effort of clicking through to the brand’s homepage, only to be routed to a jarringly contrasted and bland experience. While social channels are addictive and engaging, making it easy to scroll for, let’s be honest, hours, ecommerce sites have been boring, stale, and static, with too much information laid out in literal grids. That string of cross-platform content your social media manager bent over backwards producing has routed your potential customer to an utterly anti-climactic landing page. In order to compete in today’s hyper competitive ecommerce landscape, this disconnect between 3rd party platform presence and a brand’s own site has to be remedied.

Innovating 1st party customer interactions is exactly what CEO and Founder Andrew Conti has set out to do with Reactive. We’re stoked to be backing Andrew and wholeheartedly believe in his bet that the future of e-commerce will be all about higher engagement powered by increasingly interactive media. And live infrastructure is the perfect way to bring interactivity to e-commerce, creating a new way for merchants to promote product drops, seasonal collections, and so much more.

Reactive has built out impressive capabilities on the backend, enabling them to beat out everyone in the space with their hyper-low latency and high fidelity streams. Their world’s first interaction technology allows merchants to affordably connect with their customers at scale while generating a treasure trove of 1st party user data. They’ve cracked providing truly native experiences anywhere on the web that always work great; no detrimental iframes required. Reactive primarily empowers live shopping, but they’ve also made it possible for merchants to inject ‘shoppable’ capability into any of a brand’s existing video assets. Instead of going live on instagram, only to have customers clumsily be redirected to the product page, merchants now have the opportunity to route customers directly as streams are native to the site itself.

And in case there was any question as to the power of product videos when it comes to converting potential customers, let’s take a brief look at the sleuthing/decision making phase of the customer purchase journey. The criticality of this phase is, in some ways, unique to e-commerce. Without being able to try things on before purchase — be it pants, bras, lipstick, or complexion products — customers will search everywhere for videos that can give them a better sense of shade ranges, sizing and general quality. According to 2022’s Shopify Future of Commerce Report, 46% of “consumers want to watch product videos before they buy.” Moreover, “from web searches to livestreams, video is becoming the primary way the next generation of shoppers make buying decisions.”

This represents an incredible opportunity for brands to engage with customers directly as they make their way to a final purchase. The Reactive app is embedded into your site, allowing merchants to easily start a low-latency live stream from their store’s admin panel, post pre-recorded content, or attach prior live-streams. Once the stream has begun, brands will be able to send their visitors products to purchase, polls to answer, and discounts and gifts with purchase.

Since closing their round, Reactive has rolled out “living replays,” providing deeper and richer experiences for the viewer while capturing first-party consumer data via polls and customer questions answerable through chat. Moreover, they recently released a whole host of features improving the shop-along experience. Now, merchants are able to direct customers to collection or product pages through a link, and add a group of products to the stream that are browse-able and buyable at any time.

Given the emphasis on streaming, the Reactive team’s background should serve as no surprise. Before founding Reactive, Andrew worked on back-end systems scaling at HQ Trivia and Giphy. He is joined by Head of Design and Front End Engineering Lead John Jannetty (who was instrumental in the success of FreeBird and LevelUp) and Erik Garcia (with a background in scalable video marketing from Vicky and video-based qvc from Products). With the cash from their raise, the team has been able to bring on an impressive CMO and push new product features monthly.

Reactive is the infrastructure merchants need in order to modernize their websites and meet consumer expectations around engagement and interactivity. By connecting directly with customers, merchants are able to sell faster through highly shoppable, live and prerecorded video content that never routes customers away from their storefront.

After just 2 months using the app, M.M.LaFleur gushed that “Reactive helped [them] increase sales!,” explaining that they “normally host launch events to celebrate new products,” but when they “started using Reactive, [they] saw sales increase significantly.” They raved that the app was great with exciting updates coming out all the time. In a glowing review, they described Reactive as “easy to use on the merchant side and also user-friendly on the customer side.”

Reactive makes e-commerce storefronts the primary sales channel for merchants, simplifying their efforts and converting customers. Gone are the days of static paper catalogs. Reactive brings the same engaging, influencer lead, experience as social media to the merchant’s website. Merchants are no longer stuck engaging with customers at the mercy 3rd party algorithms. And perhaps best of all, merchants are able to generate and own data derived from the experience, leveraging Reactive analytics to improve operations across the board.

The team recently closed on $1.4M from Amplify and co-investors we’re lucky to work with: Acequia Capital and Vinyl Capital.

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Amplify is a first check fund backing LA’s earliest and strongest tech teams. You can get in touch with us here. Want these updates delivered to your inbox? Join our newsletter!