How to Run a Live Shopping Show That Actually Sells | #631

Live shopping has been "the next big thing" in Australian ecommerce for five years. Grayson White has been doing it for fifteen.

Grayson White started running "breaks" (the trading card version of live shopping) at Cherry Collectables back in 2008. Cherry is now Australia's biggest trading card retailer, and what Grayson has built since isn't a sales channel. It's a community of hundreds of thousands of collectors who trust the brand enough to move 1,600% more product on a single new release than they ever had before.

In this week's Playbook, Nathan unpacks the model behind Cherry's result and what it means for any retailer trying to make live shopping actually convert, including 40-year-old fashion brand Motto, which grew 127% in twelve months on the back of daily 4pm streams, and Oz Hair and Beauty, which deliberately started live before TikTok Shop arrived in Australia.

Today, we're discussing:

• Why live shopping works when buying is one of three reasons people showed up [03:00]
• The three-audience model that took Motto from a COVID pivot to 127% growth [06:30]
• Why most brands kill the room by coming across as a catalogue [09:30]
• How fifteen years of trust earned Cherry the 1,600% activation on a single drop [12:00]
• Why Whatnot works where social live shopping in Australia still doesn't [15:00]
• Why every show needs an event hook, not just a schedule [17:00]

Connect with Grayson White | Explore Cherry Collectables 

Transcript

Fast Delivery Stats And Report

0:01

Did you know that retailers who are offering fast delivery outperform their competitors by 4% during Black Friday? And that's not just a stat, that's a signal for where growth is going to come from. Shippett's Commerce Delivery Report breaks down why speed equals success, as well as the other forces shaping delivery in 2026. From automation and AI to fulfillment and inventory, this report offers a really practical roadmap for the next phase of retail growth. If you want all the stats and the directions for what is coming in fulfillment, make sure you download this report at shipit.com forward slash CDR2026. That's shipit.com forward slash CDR2026.

Why Live Shopping Still Stalls

0:54

Live shopping, hey, it's been kicking around for a long time and has been the next big thing in e-commerce for about five years now. And it was the next big thing when Instagram was about to roll out native commerce. It was the next big thing when TikTok shop arrived in some countries and not others. It was the next big thing when Whatnot launched. And most of the brands I speak to are still watching it from the sideline, waiting to see if it's going to stick before they commit to it. The hesitation, it's understandable. Most of the live shopping experiments I've seen brands run follow the same pattern. They go live, they introduce a few products, they discount something to drive urgency, get some views, but almost no sales. And then they call it unproven. It kind of sits in the corner waiting for it to take off again. Grayson White has been running live shopping at Cherry Collectibles since before most Australian brands even heard the term. He started doing Breaks, which is the trading card version of live shopping way back in 2008. Cherry is now Australia's biggest trading card retailer. And what Grayson has built over 15 years isn't a sales channel. It's a community and an entertainment channel of hundreds of thousands of collectors who trust the brand enough to move 1600% more product on a single new release than they've ever had before. And that result didn't come from paid media. They didn't put it through Meta. It was 15 years of showing up on camera and giving people something they cared about and something worth watching. Then the sale came. Let's hear it from Grayson.

What Breaks Are And Why They Work

2:42

I really want to talk about live shopping, but before we get to that, tell me about breaks. I educated myself a little bit in breaks, coming from the non-card collector world, discovering brakes and discovering how big they are and how much of an event it is. I just had a thousand ideas of how we could potentially take this out of just cards and apply it to a broader retailer e-commerce sense. But to start with, can you just explain the concept of breaks and how you bring your community together over them? Yeah. Well, historically they've always been called breaks. We've shifted to calling them live shopping to sort of align more with the modern terminology that the wider community is probably beginning to get familiar with. But essentially they began around 2008, 2009 when there were products in the marketplace that were too expensive to justify one person buying them, or they certainly weren't selling through with any velocity with one person buying them. And as such, people started to see good value in taking a $1,000 item and dividing it by the 30 possible teams. So you might buy the Los Angeles Lakers because you collect Los Angeles. And I buy the Chicago Bulls because I like Derek Rose. And then in that product, when it gets open live on camera to a community of people that are chatting and familiar with each other and taking the piss out of each other, then you would get any of the uh Lakers cards that came out, and I would get any of the Chicago Bulls cards that came out. And if there were no Lakers cards, you get nothing. And it just caught fire. People that wanted the cards loved it. People that wanted the theater loved it. People that wanted to just talk shit loved it. It was a beautiful community, a really fun time in my life where how I kind of saw the future of trading cards being this really kind of live IRL experience was realized. And you know, I love my staff. I've got an incredible team. I'm so extraordinarily lucky. But it there's something beautiful as well about every single cent being yours and every decision being yours, and every mistake being yours too, because you make a lot of those. So that was a really beautiful time. And breaks or live shopping just grew and grew and grew, and now there's so many different ways to do it. And just recently, obviously, Whatnot, which is yeah, I think like a $12 billion company now. Huge. There's not that many in Australia using it, though, is there? There's a fair few now. Only launched a year ago. Alibar is the world's largest live shopping. Yep. But it's Alibar is kind of like the DFO. Whatnot is like your specific, it's like you're going there for collectibles, whether that's collectible clothes or collectible toys or cards. It's a very specialized store and it is built for performance. It just works. Yeah. It is going to make, I'm not too sure what the average age is of your listeners, but for the ones that are under 20, I think it's going to make a lot of them millionaires. It's not playing around. It does the work and you just need to find what the what the product is that you drop in, and whether that's you collected Lego, you're going to put minifigures on it, or you know, you collected DVDs and you're going to put those on there or whatever clothes, you collect band t-shirts, you've found a place you can buy those out of Japan, like boom, boom, boom, and yeah, you're going to have seriously good results. And so obviously

Whatnot And The Event Mindset

6:05

a very different mindset from e-com where you can list your products up and hope they sell. And once the inventory hits zero, your job's done. On live shopping, how do you approach that from a even a scheduling or a planning perspective? Do you consider it kind of like episodes or shows, or do you just kind of go events? Like how do you kind of think about that differently to kind of build hype for these events on Wardno? Yeah, well, to answer your question, Nathan, but you know, not well. We're at a point where we are a slow-moving ship compared to you know, kids are hopping on that platform and they're just dominating it from the moment they hop on. We got to go through the whole process of creating a strategic objective, you know, getting the people behind that, not overburdening the people that are already in that space. Like there's a whole process that is involved in developing something like that. And there's certainly people out there that are doing phenomenally. They should be events. Every show should have an event, a really clear call to action to them. And to an extent we're getting better at that. My team are extraordinarily good at YouTube, which is where we kind of made our money and our community. That's where they live. And bringing those into that whatnot environment is something that we're learning every day and we're getting better at and we're investing in. But like you say, the moment it's like walking into a shopping center, and what you need to do is have a really nice storefront. And there's a real skill, isn't there, to being a TVSN type personality in the modern world compared to being a content creator or an influencer where you can go back and edit your stuff, like to keep people entertained constantly and to fold in product and sales messages at the same time as keeping it entertaining.

Trust Before Transaction On Live

7:42

What have you learnt around live shopping, especially through all your events, to make it not only entertaining, but to actually move product at the same time? Yeah, well, that's really something that's difficult and you need to work with it delicately. Our marketing approach has always been that we've never wanted to come across as a catalogue. We treat our community as an engaged and a group of collectors who want to escape the grind of whatever they're doing for work and be able to still take part, whether or not they want to be the person who's just making jokes in the stream or they want to be the person who just observes what people get. And so we really focus on that, and then every now and then we've got an offer, we'll fold in an offer for them that we think is something that is either going to be a good value to them or something that's going to be really interesting for everyone who's watching. And I think that when you've got that trust, they will activate. Yep. So for example, today, the Select NRL trading cards launch, when we do put up a post or we do put up a show and we say, hey guys, world premiere of Select NRL trading cards, we find that our community go, they trust us that we're we're not just, you know, trying to move them widgets for the sake of moving them widgets, and they're not going to get another email that says, hey, do you want more widgets? Like that's just not how we operate. What Cherry built here isn't a sales channel. You can't compare it to the e-commerce channel or Amazon. They've actually built a model for how entertainment and commerce work together. And it transfers well beyond trading cards. I mean, trading cards are cool, but I'm sure we can all think of ways that we can use live shopping in our business.

The Three Audiences That Show Up

9:29

So here's a few lessons. Number one, live shopping works when buying is one of the reasons that people turn up. Sounds obvious, right? But the reason that the breaks model caught fire and most live shopping experiments don't comes down to who the show is built for. Grayson says there are three distinct audiences that turn up to every card break. There are the collectors who want the cards, the people that just want the theater, and the people that just want to turn up to be part of the conversation. One of those three is there to transact. I don't know, that sounds grim, but one of those three is there to transact. The other two aren't. The other two are there for entertainment. And if you design the show only for those groups that are there for entertainment, you lose the whole point of the thing. Motto Fashions is a 40-year-old Australian women's fashion brand, and they proved this when COVID forced their stores to close. Lauren French and her mother, the brand's designers, started doing daily live streams on Instagram at 4 p.m. And here's the interesting bit. They were walking in three minutes before going live each day with barely a script. It was pretty raw. But the brand grew 127% in 12 months during COVID. I mean, we're all growing in COVID, but they put live streaming down to a lot of their success. They kept the streams running after lockdown because the three-audience model had taken hold. Viewers came for Lauren, for the banter, and for the style hacks. Some of them were buying. The practical question for your next live show: who is turning up to watch and who is turning up to buy? If you are only designing for the customer with purchase intent, or you're only showing up for the customer who's there for a little bit of entertainment, you're already structuring the whole show wrong.

Honest Live Reviews Build Advocates

11:15

You need a mixture of both. Lesson two, don't use live shopping as a catalog. Most brands approach a live show the same way that they'd approach a promotional email. Here's the product, here's the price, here's the reason to buy now. That structure makes complete sense in an inbox where we're trying to get to the point really quickly. But on a live show, it just kills the vibe. The people watching didn't turn up to be sold to. They turned up for something to watch. They could be watching a thousand other things. They chose to watch you. So you need a trust before transaction model because it changes what happens after the show. Natalie Angel is an independent fashion creator who goes live on Instagram every Friday to try on clothes and give honest, real-time fit reviews, including when something doesn't work for a body type or hype. There's no pitch, no, this looks great on everyone. The result isn't just purchases during the show. Her audience goes back to their own networks and recommends. It keeps people coming back and coming in to the live show. This honest review builds advocates and not just customers. And that's where we need to come through first. How do we attract people into our content? How do we get them to trust us? And then subtly give them something to buy if they love what we're doing. The approach at Cherry follows the same logic. Treat the community as collectors who want to escape the grind, who want a little bit of nostalgia. Focus on that first and then fold in the offer once you've earned the right to. When the Select NRL cards launched, Grayson's community were activated because he had 15 years of running live shopping, not just a catalog. And they knew that Cherry had something interesting to say that he wasn't just trying to move packets of something new. And so we need to check that. For our live show, how much are we building out that is entertainment versus how much are we selling? And do we have an entertaining idea in there? We should be leading with that.

Start Before Ready And Learn Live

13:22

Lesson three. Every show needs an event, not just a schedule. Even Cherry is still learning the whatnot rhythm. What separates the shows that work is that everyone should have an event frame. It's a clear reason beyond the schedule for people to show up. You need to build a bit of hype, a little bit of interest. What is different this time? But getting there requires some reps. Ozhair and Beauty started running live shows to build operational knowledge before TikTok shop arrives in Australia. But they're not doing it for the immediate revenue. When they first got up and running, their internet blurred midstream. They forgot to tell the shopping center that they were trading late, the air conditioner switched off, and their presenters end up visibly sweating while selling hair products. Not ideal. These are the problems you can only find by going live, and you need to start before you're ready, but it doesn't mean that you can't hide behind not putting an event on. If you don't launch it as an event, you'll never find out. When the format is working, a live show becomes a content factory. The authentic moments when captured live, whether they go well or not, create an event. These could be a six-figure card pull, a presenter's honest reaction. These are all better as raw material rather than anything you create from scratch or try and script. Clip them and then put them everywhere. It doesn't mean that once they happen live, they don't exist everywhere else. So you start with an event, you let the mayhem happen, hopefully it's good mayhem, and then you use that as content elsewhere.

Platform Choice Plus Clip The Mayhem

14:53

What really matters as well is platform choice because you don't go live across all platforms. Whatnot works really well for Cherry because it's purpose-built for event-driven commerce and is very much built around hobbies and interests. Trying to run live shopping on social in Australia still means navigating checkouts and a checkout friction that hasn't been properly solved, despite all the promises, and there will be a conversion drop-off there. But if you're a fashion brand, most of your audience is probably on Instagram. So it makes sense to do it there. You don't have to wait for the ideal platform that gives you all the live capabilities plus the checkout at once. So the practical check for this is you need an event hook for your next live show. If you get the hook right, then you can let the mayhem happen. Hopefully good mayhem, like I said. And then you've got content that you can then distribute through all your channels post the event. And if your audience has seen the buildup to the event, that content is likely to make a lot more sense afterwards. So live shopping is still a work in progress. No one has cracked it yet. The platforms haven't even cracked it. We've still got a lot of promises of what's to come. But the ones that are getting ahead right now aren't just showing up to camera and talking about products. They've got a show that people want to watch. They've built enough trust to fold in an offer when it matters and for it to feel authentic. And they've structured every session around an event that's worth turning up for. None of that requires a massive team or a broadcast budget. Anyone can do this. It requires a different way of thinking about what live commerce is actually for and where you turn up to do it and how you engage

The Playbook And Community Invite

16:40

your most committed communities. If you're working out where live shopping fits in your business, which platform makes sense, or how other operators are structuring their shows to actually convert, those conversations are happening right now in the Add to Cart community every day. You can join for free over on adducart.com.au. That is the playbook for this week. I'll see you next Friday.