Live commerce is demand-expansive rather than demand-efficient — it grows the overall market by helping people discover things they didn't know they wanted, much like department stores and shopping malls originally did.
Traditional e-commerce just moved existing demand online more efficiently — you still have to know exactly what you want. Live commerce expands the market by facilitating discovery, potentially making it 30-40% of a much larger total market. ✦ AI generated
Grant LaFontaine · a16z Podcast · 2026-08-19 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 19:17
“Talk about the seller base being inherently more diverse and how live is demand expansionary.”
The live format is demand expansionary because you go in and discover new things you didn't know that you would be interested in. If you look at e-commerce today, you have to know exactly what you're looking for. All it's really done is take a bunch of offline sales and bring them online in a more efficient way. As live commerce proliferates, it's just going to expand that market. Not only could it be 30 or 40% of that market, that market is going to get a lot bigger.
verbatim transcript · starts at 19:17
19:17things you didn't know that you would be interested in. >> Yes. >> Uh and so if you look at e-commerce today, it's so you have to know exactly what you're looking for. So all it's really done is take a bunch of offline sales and bring them online in a more efficient way. But you still got to know exactly what you want. And as like live commerce >> uh proliferates, it's just going to
19:42expand that market. So, not only could it be 30 or 40% of that market, um that market is going to get a lot bigger. >> Yeah. It's sort of like it would be more akin to not so much like e-commerce, but more like the inception of department stores or shopping malls. Yes. >> Right. Which is like actually expanded the the demand characteristics of the market. >> Yeah. Exactly.
20:02>> Yeah. That makes total sense. So the other thing that is so striking about the demand side and then I want to talk about the supply side in great detail because I think that's one of the most exciting things about the platform is on the demand side I understand users spend 95 minutes a day on the platform. Is that right? >> Yeah about 95 minutes. >> It's incredible.
20:21>> That's like a shocking number and puts you on par with social platforms like the entertainment platforms. >> Yeah. And it's because it's fun. Yeah. Yeah, you know, if you were if you were to sort of simplify whatnot down on like the buyer value prop is it's a fun experience to shop and there's not a whole lot of fun experiences shopping online. Um, and you know, historically