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Fanatics’ premiere live shopping event will feature collectors opening trade baseball card packages on the field during the Major League Baseball All-Star Game events in Seattle this week.
The sports platform’s new business, called Fanatics Live, centers around live shopping experiences in which users will be able to purchase trading cards and other collectibles on the Fanatics Live app while watching streams from hosts and other collectors.
Earlier this year, Fanatics hired Nick Bell, who previously led Google Search Experience teams and was Snap’s global head of content and partnerships, to serve as CEO of Fanatics Live.
Bell said Fanatics will open up its new platform for beta testing in conjunction with MLB’s All-Star Game to a small group of consumers, and the company is working with several trading card “cutters” to host the live stream directly from T-Mobile Park in Seattle.
While this first effort will focus on “cracking” — a social trading card-buying system where participants pre-purchase synced points in unopened card packs or chests that the seller then opens right after — Bell said this is just a sampling of what the fanatics plan to achieve with direct shopping once The platform will be fully launched later this month.
“We aim to make Fanatics Live the leader in live commerce,” Bell said. “We know that live commerce in the US is still really nascent, but there is a huge growth opportunity that we expect to happen over the next few months and years; hopefully it will drive all of that.”
Livestream shopping, which started in China and across Asia, has grown into a $512 billion market, according to Coresight Research. This growing popularity has propelled e-commerce platforms like Amazon, eBay, and Poshmark into the space, as well as tech platforms like Meta Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
But the trend, with vendors broadcasting live video showing and explaining the products they’re selling to viewers who are also able to ask questions — a new version of QVC, or Home Shopping Network — has been slow to gain traction in the US. Earlier this year, Meta closed support Direct shopping on Instagram, and instead turned to other forms of selling on the platform.
Bell acknowledged the challenges of streaming shopping in the US, but said he saw it as an opportunity. He cited data showing that 74% of Chinese consumers had purchased a product while watching a live broadcast, while 78% of American consumers said they had never watched a live broadcast shopping experience. However, among the American consumers who did buy, the vast majority had purchased at least one item.
Fanatics are betting that their new live shopping platform will appeal not only to the niche but enthusiastic group of trading card fans and other sports fans, but also to a broader audience of consumers who are not yet exposed to these kinds of streams. Fanatics works with a variety of leagues, brands, creators, athletes and personalities, some of which go beyond sports, for potential opportunities on the platform.
There is an “untapped intersection between the idea of content, community, and commerce,” said Chris Lamontagne, who joined Fanatics Live as the platform’s senior vice president earlier this year after serving as CEO of social commerce platform Spring.
“What we really tried to focus on is how do we build a platform that supports those three components — really simple and fun commerce, but really underpinning it all is a sense of community and a sense that you can only buy something here,” he said.
Fanatics Live has hired Scott Rogowski, former host of viral sensation HQ Trivia, to be an official host on the platform, and is looking to recruit additional hosts as well as other content creators into the gathering space to help create community gathering spaces where products are also sold. Built for the Live product, the Fanatics app features a variety of tools for sellers to make their streams engaging and interactive.
Live Trade is the fanatic’s latest effort in its continued evolution beyond the sporting goods e-commerce company launched by Michael Rubin in 2011. Now with apparel rights to nearly every sports property and a database of over 94 million fans, the company is now pushing hard to get in. into the sports betting business as well, with an offer to buy PointsBet’s US assets.
An IPO could be on the horizon for CNBC Disruptor 50’s triple-digit company, which is valued at $31 billion in December 2022. While other areas of its business are maturing — the company expects nearly $8 billion in 2023 sales, excluding trading cards. Rights – Bell said its streaming marketing efforts are just getting started.
“This is the first innings for us and we are going to learn,” said Bell. “Between now and the end of the year we expect a peak pace of innovation.”
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