The UK's first live-streaming shoppable platform, born in Oxford, launches in-app loyalty gamification
OOOOO, the UK’s first live-streaming shoppable platform, continue to innovate with the introduction of advanced in-app gamification specifically developed to encourage consumer loyalty and organically grow its shopping community.
OOOOO was founded last year by Sam Jones and Eric Zhang and now has offices in Oxford and Shanghai. It helps brands and entrepreneurs share their products and services with customers through live, interactive, shoppable videos.
OOOOO Entertainment Commerce operates a technology platform that enables key opinion leaders/influencers to create, edit and share opinions through short and live videos that are tagged to products. These videos are then shared across the key opinion leader/influencers extensive social media networks. The platform pays a commission to the key opinion leader/influencer for each product sold through their videos. The application also allows live, interactive commerce, and social features in which the price of a product decreases as more people buy.
Last month OOOOO listed on the Toronto, Canada (TSX) Venture Exchange and open the market. Sam Jones CEO at OOOOO, said: "OOOOO's TSX-V listing is a culmination of hard work by too many people to mention individually, from the folks at Evermount in Canada to our team across UK, China and USA and service providers in many locations. We believe that the retail industry will continue to undergo wholesale changes and that live, interactive mobile commerce will be adopted aggressively as a new way to launch products, entertain and engage audiences and ultimately convert sales. Our mission is to take a leadership role in the fast emerging livestream economy."
Live-streaming is a mega-trend in China, and OOOOO is aiming to develop the best in technology to deliver the entertaining e-commerce experience to the UK.
The live-streaming app has now introduced in-app gamification technology to encourage organic growth, generate customer retention and user stickiness by incentivising customers to return to the app daily.
OOOOO has formed exclusive partnerships with online woman's clothing retailer I Saw It First, The Fragrance Shop, JD Sports and Ann Summers with more than 275,000 downloads to date, it says.
Last week saw the launch of the in-app ‘OOOOO Tree’ game, with the premise being to initiate a network effect and daily return to the app by converting online behaviour to offline prizes. The game encourages the player to nurture the growth of their virtual tree daily, and once the tree reaches full growth they will be rewarded with branded beauty box and orange juice. Players are incentivised to speed up the growth of the tree by inviting their friends to sign up to the app.
The company describes its thus: "Think QVC meets TikTok for Gen-Z, OOOOO is an immersive, interactive e-commerce realm where entertainment meets shopping via interactive, live-streamed shoppable shows."
The value of Live-streaming e-commerce is estimated to reach $305 billion this year, according to Forbes magazine). Having recognised the potential of this revolutionary technology in the UK, OOOOO was launched in November by two tech leaders from Wish.com and TikTok.
Sam Jones, UK based co-founder, said: “We do not buy ads, rather invest efforts in driving organic growth and appeal of the OOOOO experience through building live entertainment into the shoppable shows.”
“Marketplaces are generally designed to keep you in the app for as little time as possible. Amazon is an amazing experience, but often a very lonely and rapid one. The Chinese have a retention first approach, with the apps designed to encourage social commerce, community interaction and daily visits to the platform through the integration of gamification. Customers reap the rewards of inviting friends and whilst in the app are alerted to live shows, essentially cutting out the expense of the ad network.”
Oxford-based Sam Jones is a serial entrepreneur. He started his career at Accenture as a technology consultant in 1999, before a career in executive search where he ran a leading firm specialising in Investment Banking. He spent 10 years in Sydney, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Sam started three technology companies over the course of five years from 2012 to 2017 that all related to data. Sam joined eCommerce unicorn Wish as Managing Director of Marketing in 2017, which today has a valuation of $14bn.
Eric started his career as a mobile software engineer at Huawei before becoming a founding member of the Musical.ly start up team as an engineering team lead, helping grow from 0 to 10 million daily active users. Post the acquisition of Musical.ly by Bytedance, Eric was a leader across Douyin and TikTok research and development teams to promote user growth in all major markets.
