Live shopping is when a seller sells products on a live video stream while viewers buy in real time. Think market stall rather than website - someone's holding the item up, telling you about it, and taking bids from a room of people who all want it. On Tilt, that's around 10 seconds of bidding per item, with a chat full of regulars trying to get there first.
Why live selling took off
Live commerce is already widespread in China, where it's worth around $700bn a year. Globally, it’s expected to reach $2tn by 2030.
The reason behind the growth? Online shopping got extremely good at efficiency - static listing, search bars - but lost everything else. Live selling brings back discovery, entertainment and the person on the other end of the transaction.
Tilt is one of the major players innovating live commerce in the West, with the most advanced AI tools in the category. Take Snap - you hold up an item to the camera, describe it, and within seconds your listing is created. What used to take 10 minutes now happens instantly.
That same technology is what makes selling on Tilt work two ways. Go live and run auctions in real time, or use Clips: film an item, and the video itself becomes a shoppable listing that buyers can find outside live streams, in a feed that never goes offline. Two ways to sell, one idea: real people showing real things on video.
How live selling works
On Tilt, auctions run in rounds of around 10 seconds, and the clock resets whenever someone becomes the highest bidder, so two people after the same jacket can keep it going for minutes.
Sellers can set a secret minimum price, known as a reserve, but many Tilt auctions don't have one so you can find real steals on the app.
Card details are saved in the app, so buying takes a single tap. Everything gets packed and posted after the stream.
World’s Fastest Marketplace
Live commerce turns a phone and some stock into a business, with no website, warehouse or ad budget in front of it. A busy Tilt stream gets through 100 items in a couple of hours, and every one of them is sold to someone who chose to spend their evening watching you. That’s much faster than creating a static listing, which can take weeks or months to get sold.
The economics help: Tilt takes 2% + 50p per sale, so sellers keep 98% of what they make, where most marketplaces take somewhere between 8% and 13%. This means anyone can start a business without any upfront capital.
How to start selling live
You need less than you'd think: a phone, some stock, and a time slot in the week you'll actually stick to. Consistency does more than follower count, because that's how a stream turns into an audience.
Apply to become a seller at www.tilt.app. And if you're not ready to go live, Clips lets you start straight away, just film your item and post.
Live selling is where shopping stops being a search box and starts being something you turn up for. Tilt is built for exactly that.