Live Cards: The Gamechanger of China's Ecommerce Landscape

Digital storefront has always been a battleground for brands and companies to flex their creativity and attract more customers. However, while WeChat Mini Programs can create a program from scratch or with pre-built templates, Taobao and Tmall store setup is limited to individual modules.

As of March 2022, Taobao and Tmall stores received an exciting new feature called "live cards" that allows online stores to incorporate various interactive components. With live cards, brands and companies now have more ways to engage with customers and create immersive shopping experiences.

While the Live Card feature is available for both Taobao and Tmall storefronts, they are more popular among brands and are mainly utilized on Tmall storefronts. In fact, around 80% of Tmall stores currently use Live Cards to enhance their storefront and provide a more engaging user experience.

What Is A Live Card?

Live Cards are a new feature introduced by Taobao Tmall in March 2022 that enables brands to showcase their products in more interactive ways. They allow brands to highlight unique product characteristics central to their industry and create a more flexible and engaging shopping experience for customers.

By utilizing Live Cards on different pages and scenarios, brands can have more control over the interactions available and, thus, the overall user experience.

Here are the pages and scenarios where Live Cards can be applied.

Pages:
-Store homepage
-“Second floor” (full-screen module accessed by scrolling down from the store home page)
-Brand name search results

Scenarios:
-Product recommendation: e.g., skin analysis (Avenue / L’Oreal), oral health analysis (Usmile)
-Product display: e.g., 3D/AR/VR
-Campaigns and promotions: e.g., gamification

By incorporating Live Cards into their online stores, brands can create a more dynamic and immersive shopping experience that will keep customers coming back for more.

Why Are Live Cards Taking Over Tmall Stores

Live Cards have become hugely popular since their introduction, with 80% of Tmall Stores already using them to enhance their store interface. If you're wondering what makes Live Cards so appealing to brands, we've done some research and summarized their main advantages for you:

More Freedom In Customization

• Live Cards provide more APIs and permissions for sensors, e.g., accelerometer and gyroscope.

• Taobao stores are now more than just an ecommerce platform - they are a "second official website" for many brands. Live Cards provide an excellent opportunity for brands to impress customers and communicate their culture and values. With the introduction of Live Cards, the ceiling for innovative interface design has been raised, giving brands with truly unique and creative designs a chance to gain an even greater competitive edge.

Backed with data, Live Cards simplify user behavior tracking and page optimization

• Analyzing user behavior tracking for individual store modules is essential to continually improve a store. With Live Cards, ecommerce operation specialists can examine data such as page views, conversions, and time spent on modules to identify which content and interactions are performing well. By doing so, they can optimize the interface to create an even better user experience.

• Users can now enjoy more personalized content with Live Cards. By utilizing data such as purchase history, membership status, and even skin condition, brands can customize Live Card content to suit each individual user better. This could potentially lead to more sales as users feel more engaged and catered to.

• Live Cards circulate in both public domains (e.g., daily-updated store recommendation feature on the homepage) and private domains (e.g., homepage and “second floor” of the store, category page, and product details page.

• Live Cards make information updates faster and more convenient. Since Live Card content is linked to backend data, things like price changes and inventory status can be automatically updated, saving time and effort for both the brands and the users.

Live Cards are stepping stones into rich Mini Program experiences

• Having evolved from the existing Taobao Mini Programs (MP), Live Cards are essentially lightweight, card-like versions of MPs embedded in places like the store homepage.

• Live Cards allow interactions to happen where they’re added without the need to jump to other pages, resulting in a seamless user experience with few interruptions.

• Live Cards can also serve as a gateway to Taobao Mini Programs, which offer more dynamic and immersive interactions in a full-screen experience.

How to Create Unique Live Cards For Your Brand

Although Live Cards offer more flexibility for customization, brands are limited to a set of module styles and templates provided by Taobao. As a result, many store interfaces can end up looking quite similar if they all use the same templates.

To create a unique and differentiated Tmall store interface and user experience, brands must seek experienced third-party development teams to elevate their Live Card designs.

Here is an overview of steps if your brand wants to start customizing innovative Live Cards:

1. Find a local development team since most of the documents provided by Taobao will only be in Chinese.

2. Work together to elaborate on your needs and ideas; an experienced development team usually has designers on board and can provide design support if necessary.

3. After discussing and confirming the ideas and requirements, the development team will analyze the needs from a technical perspective and then start the live card development work.

Live Card Design & Development Service at Digital Creative

Looking for a development team to help elevate your Tmall store interface and user experience?

Our development team at Digital Creative works with digital and technical leaders of best-in-class global brands to build complex technical solutions that realize their ideas. We have worked with many brands to develop their mobile apps, web apps, and websites and are experienced in creating sophisticated and highly customized modules for our clients.

Our experienced team of digital and technical leaders will work closely with you to understand your needs and ideas and use our technical expertise to create sleek, modern designs that convert.

Tell us about your project!