Live commerce has grown into a legitimate growth channel for sellers. But unfortunately, managing operations, syncing inventory, and fulfilling orders across multiple platforms and channels isn’t easy.
Thankfully, Shopify and Whatnot have collaborated on an integration to help automatically sync your products, inventory, and orders between platforms, to make managing your operations much easier.
How Does the Integration Work?
The way the Shopify and Whatnot integration works is straightforward. It simply connects your Shopify store directly to Whatnot, which allows you to manage your inventory, sync products, and fulfill your orders in one place instead of jumping from platform to platform. The integration works not only for live auction selling on the platform, but also for fixed-price listings.
When you sync your products, it ensures key details like titles, descriptions, inventory, and pricing stay updated on each platform. However, keep in mind that Shopify stays as the point of truth for synced fields, which helps keep things consistent and reduces the chance of conflicts.
The integration should help sellers save time, reduce the need to create duplicate product listings, and prevent them from having to manually track and update inventory.
Currently, the integration is available in the Shopify App Store in several markets, including the USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Australia, and the Netherlands.
Getting started with the integration is as easy as installing the Whatnot Sales Channel app, connecting your Whatnot account to Shopify, syncing your products, adding your prices, confirming that your products synced properly, and configuring your listings in Whatnot.
The Growth of Livestream Shopping
Whether it’s on Whatnot or a different platform, livestream selling and shopping is becoming an incredibly popular way for merchants to get products in front of new customers.
For those unfamiliar, livestream selling is when a company or individual sells or promotes products via online video streaming. This combines entertainment with instant purchases, and often includes a host demonstrating, talking about, and showing off a product as viewers buy or bid on it.
Live selling may offer several benefits for businesses, such as high engagement, improved conversion rates, and better loyalty. Also, the live aspect of this type of selling (plus things like time-limited deals or discounts that often appear during a live stream) helps create a sense of urgency among buyers, encouraging immediate purchases.
It also offers a more personalized and trustworthy shopping experience, as many viewers appreciate the unedited and live video that often feels more authentic and “real” than scripted production descriptions and pre-made videos showing off a product.
The livestream ecommerce market is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years and is projected to reach over $250 billion by 2034. This is massive growth from the reported $14.83 billion value in 2024 and $19.86 value in 2025.
Selling via livestreams is also gaining popularity all over the world. For example, it has played a role in driving the apparel, footwear, and accessories industry in Southeast Asia. Also, eBay Live, a competitor to Whatnot in the space, also just launched in Canada this year, as well as in some European markets like France and Italy.
Finding Success While Selling Live
If your business is considering diving into livestream selling, there are some things to keep in mind. First, focus on promoting visually-appealing products that lend themselves well to demonstration.
Next, do your best to develop a consistent schedule when you go live. This helps you create and develop an audience much more effectively than going live at random times to sell.
While it’s okay to start with a simple setup, consider trying to make production high-quality by using a good camera, solid lighting, and a professional backdrop. Finally, make sure to choose the right host. They should be charismatic, have plenty of energy, be comfortable engaging with the chat, and be knowledgeable enough to answer questions about the products.
Whether a company is selling clothing, collectibles, electronics, or skincare products, livestream shopping is a high-engagement and authentic way to reach their target audience. Also, Shopify and Whatnot coming together to make managing livestream selling operations easier should only help this emerging sales channel to continue to grow.
