The State of Shoppable Live TV 2026
In 2025, shoppable live content began to come of age in Europe. Having already achieved massive success in Asia over the last few years, the concept had struggled to gain a foothold in Europe as a viable option for retailers and brands. This changed in 2025, as major platforms and brands began to put significant resources behind the shoppable live concept. Amazon brought its shoppable live service, Amazon Live, a long-established platform for brands in the US, to Europe in February 2025 with an initial live stream for the launch of the Samsung S25 phone in the UK and Germany. Since that initial stream, it has delivered more than 20 branded streams in Europe and is looking to sharply increase that number in 2026.
The functionality, which is available to brands that spend a certain amount on media for a campaign, enables live streams to be delivered through the brand’s storefront. Like most platforms, the functionality of Amazon Live comprises a video window with clickable products below and an interactive chat module to the right.
Shoppable video on Amazon Live
For shoppable live on social in Europe, there are only two platforms that proactively support the functionality: TikTok and YouTube.
TikTok, which has long promoted the idea of shoppable live on the platform, further increased its reach in Europe with expansion from the UK into France, Germany, and Italy in March 2025. By summer 2025, TikTok Shop campaigns saw a 122% growth in gross merchandise value (GMV)—a measure of total sales value for merchants—in the EU and a 600% rise in the UK. Also in the UK, there were 200,000-plus active sellers who saw 93% annual sales growth from 2024, with more than 6,000 shoppable lives daily.
In France, the market is much less mature, with only 42% of French consumers aware of the feature 1 week after launch and 36% ready to make a purchase. In Germany, adoption was also slow, with only about 2.5% of consumers making a purchase within the first 2 months of launch. Key barriers in the European market are questions of trust around the products being supplied and the people selling them. For example, when a product is offered on an influencer’s own page with an offer on TikTok Shop, consumers still have questions about who is fulfilling the order and how safe a purchase it is.
TikTok Shop UK
Despite these issues, the conversion rates on TikTok remain high in Europe, at between 9% and 30%, far surpassing traditional sales advertising. Fifty percent of TikTok users globally have made a purchase, but this is obviously skewed by the more mature Asian market, where shoppable live has become a cultural norm. However, the multiple requirements for integration with TikTok Shop are proving to be a barrier to entry for some brands. Several brands have also had a problem in pilot phases with attracting viewers to their own channels. They often use large discounts to draw audiences, which can be counterproductive, leaving viewers suspicious of the legitimacy of the channel itself as well as reducing the brand’s overall profit.
YouTube seem to be revisiting the idea of promoting their shoppable live functionality in 2026, with rumours suggesting there will be a sharper focus on attracting brands to the service after the functionality had not been heavily promoted for a couple of years.
The relatively simple integration with existing ecommerce platforms is potentially a big advantage for YouTube. It removes the requirement to use a third-party shop like TikTok Shop. In addition, since transactions occur on the brand’s own site, issues of trust are eliminated, as viewers are immediately placed into the brand’s familiar ecommerce journey. However, not all social platforms are continuing to support shoppable live. X still has the functionality available, but it is rarely used and doesn’t seem to be proactively promoted. Instagram and Facebook Live have completely retired shoppable live functionality, with only Instagram still having on-demand shoppable functionality.
eBay Live
In terms of other platforms, eBay launched its shoppable live service, eBay Live, in the UK in June 2025 and in Germany in November 2025. There was a heavy focus on sales of trading cards, fashion, toys, and electronics. The lives generally had a very simple setup in terms of the content, with streams being delivered via a phone and normally presented on a simple set with one or two hosts.
This was very similar to the lives for the majority of TikTok shoppable content. Auction mechanics can be configured so there is a set amount of time to bid, like a traditional auction, or the ability to set a window for people to bid—e.g., 10 seconds—and every time a bid is made, the timer resets.
eBay Live UK
The obvious advantage of the eBay setup is that it has one central page where all currently live content can be seen, along with upcoming lives sorted by product category, and users can set notifications for when those streams start.
Whatnot
There also appears to be space in the market for dedicated shoppable live platforms and apps—such as Whatnot—that work in a similar way to eBay Live. In 2025, Whatnot saw 600% growth in the number of European sellers year on year, with 20,000 hours of shows every week. The average user watches more than 65 minutes of content per day, which indicates a high level of engagement.
Whatnot remains focused on similar products as other platforms, such as beauty, fashion, and consumer electronics, with niche products and certain brands like Lego selling well. Live auction sites offer a familiar experience to viewers, and, as in the case of eBay, an established platform with significant consumer trust can overcome some of the issues associated with TikTok. As the shoppable live auction market continues to grow, it may be a case of when, not if, other brands such as Vinted launch similar services.
Dedicated live shoppable platform WhatNot
Brand-specific shoppable services
Brands are also getting in on the action. ASOS launched its own platform, ASOS Live, in 2025, and Marks and Spencer (M&S) is still investing in live shopping after several years of creating content. ASOS launched a shoppable live service on its own app in October 2025 with a series of lives featuring both staff and influencers. The lives themselves were reasonably short (between 3 and 10 minutes) and covered a range of formats, including brand-specific edits, fashion styling, and beauty tutorials. This closely mirrors the content consumed by its target audience on social platforms.
Unlike any other platform, there is no form of chat or interactivity within ASOS Live in its current incarnation, which makes the live experiences (if indeed they are live) somewhat pointless, increasing risk for no real benefit. With no interactivity, there is no real reason for the audience to watch or shop live, as the product offers persist beyond the live, and currently 94% of total viewers watch on demand. Having successfully launched the service, will ASOS use the interactive elements of the medium this year? The advantages of live, which include longer viewing times and higher degrees of engagement and purchase, would seem to make it a no-brainer.
M&S has been a trailblazer brand in the UK when it comes to shoppable live. The Sparks Live streams have been delivered through M&S’s own site and on YouTube since late 2021. In the first few months, they managed to attract more than 50,000 viewers, with another 100,000 viewers watching the on-demand version of the lives on YouTube.
Marks & Spencer Sparks Live
Each live shopping event now attracts an average of 17,000 viewers, and since its launch, the service has generated more than £14 million in revenue. This is despite Sparks Live being unavailable from April to June 2025 due to a large cyberattack that took down a range of M&S services, including online ordering and stock systems.
Overall, the live shopping experience’s key metrics remain not only total sales but the length of time it increases viewers’ stay on the platform, which in turn leads to a higher average basket price.
QVC-style shoppable content
Given the growth of the shoppable live video market over the last year and a report from McKinsey saying that up to 20% of all ecommerce sales could start on live streams by the end of 2026, there is a big question over how these various platforms and brands can maximise the opportunity for themselves. For platforms such as Facebook Live and X, the question may be whether they left the market too quickly.
Outside of the platforms, the variety of content in the space sees a wide range of approaches being used. The spectrum of content goes from direct QVC-style straight sales content normally linked with some kind of discount all the way to branded entertainment. The vast majority of TikTok and eBay content, for example, sits in the QVC-style category.
In the middle of the spectrum is magazine-style content. This is content that would feel at home on a magazine-style TV programme and could be a segment on makeup, fashion tips, or the top toys for Christmas. While the brand and products still have a high degree of visibility, these are much more educational pieces, which drives viewers down the sales funnel by answering key questions, demonstrating benefits, etc. The impact is not only measured in pure sales, unlike the QVC-style content, but also by how viewers have engaged and whether the content has improved their purchasing intent or feelings towards the brand and products. At the top of the funnel, this means that viewers are being introduced to the products, while those already in the funnel are being moved closer to purchase through education and benefit promotion.
Branded entertainment formats
At the other end of the spectrum from QVC-style content are the branded entertainment formats. These are even more subtle, with content that has genuine entertainment value and features the products themselves woven all the way through. The narrative seamlessly shows off the products’ benefits. This type of content could be a piece of marketing activity on a social platform such as YouTube.
Take the example of a music artist who is mid-tour and halfway through promoting an album. Normally, their label would create content to promote both further album and ticket sales. By developing a live piece of content with the artist debuting a new video and taking questions from the fans, the label can promote the tour and album. By adding a layer of shoppable live, it can also drive revenue. In this example, that might be the capability to buy tour merch from the artist’s shop, which is particularly appealing to those who won’t make it to a gig due to geographic or ticket-availability issues.
The artist can also promote unique products, such as signed physical media, which is only available on the stream. This can give viewers a unique opportunity, and it also justifies a higher price point (potentially just recommended retail price, or RRP) rather than fans going to a third-party retailer to get a small discount on media.
Outlook for 2026
With the variety of content and platforms available, what does 2026 hold for shoppable live? We will see a growing number of brands begin to experiment with what is viable as shoppable live content both on third-party platforms and their own websites.
With options on social platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, as well as on their own sites, Amazon, and specialist apps such as Whatnot, we are likely to see a year of piloting, with department store and specialist retailers taking the first steps to deliver live shopping opportunities. As specialist retailers have already found a rich vein of potential customers for more niche products, unless they offer products in these collectible areas, department stores are likely to look at either lives on their website, which always has the issue of attracting an audience, or on simple platforms such as YouTube, where they can easily integrate their existing ecommerce systems.
With this wave of experimentation, single-product-category retailers are likely to have to experiment the most to see where they can engage with their audiences. For them, this may be within a broad range of platforms with lots of piloting required to find their audience. Big brands may just stick to the potentially more efficient and easier-to-engage-with platforms such as Amazon that, despite the ad spend required to go live, are a simpler logistical proposition and deliver a stable ROI per campaign.
2026 will be a year of significant growth for shoppable TV, and the $10 billion total spend across Europe on shoppable live is likely to double over the course of the year. The brands that really make an impact will be those that can develop compelling viewing experiences without relying purely on discounts to deliver sales.
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