Live commerce: everyone plays defense. We build for the joy of buying.
In China, livestream shopping moves hundreds of billions; most Europeans have never tried it. Why exactly that gap is our bet.
Let us start with a number that appears in almost no German strategy deck: in 2024, according to industry analyses, roughly 800 billion US dollars were transacted via livestream shopping in China, and the number keeps climbing. A single sales format is approaching the size of the entire American e-commerce market. And in the West? There, around two thirds of consumers have never bought a product through social or live formats.
That gap is not a footnote. It is one of the biggest open bets in European consumer business. And it is overlooked precisely because half the industry is busy with something else.
Everyone is optimizing the defense
Listen to how people talk about artificial intelligence and you hear almost nothing but defense: safety, efficiency, cost reduction, risk mitigation. A cost-cutting case sells itself in any boardroom. A thesis about the joy of buying sounds like a luxury in the same room. Yet the joy of buying is not a luxury; it is the actual engine of commerce. Buying was never just a transaction. Buying has always been theater, advice, recommendation, community. The pure efficiency lens has lost exactly that part from view.
Efficiency wins meetings. Desire wins markets.
Why the West underrates the format
The most common objection: we already had teleshopping. That is a category error. Live commerce as it works in Asia is not late-night TV with an order hotline. It is the combination of three things classic e-commerce does not deliver: entertainment people tune into voluntarily. Trust, because a person shows the product live, inspects it and answers questions. And real-time scarcity that turns watching into deciding. It works especially well in categories with collector logic: trading cards and slabs, sneakers, vintage, collectibles of every kind.
The role of agents: selling, not guarding
This is where AI comes in, but differently than the defensive story suggests. In our reading it is a seller and curator: the right recommendation at the right moment, the discovery you would never have reached alone, the curation that turns an endless catalog into a personal storefront. Agentic systems scale the moments where watching becomes buying. People stay in control: the creator sets the tone, governance draws the limits.
That is exactly what Slabhit is built for, the live-commerce product from the environment of The Agentics: interactive selling, real-time auctions, creator-led commerce, curated and GDPR-compliant, with an iOS beta from September. So we are not writing this thesis from the sideline. We are putting our own capital and our own work behind it.
The bet, in concrete terms
Our assumption is sober: the consumer behavior that created a hundreds-of-billions market in Asia will not stop at European borders. It needs Western answers on privacy, curation and trustworthiness, and that is precisely the opportunity for founders building now. People do not want to shop less. They want to shop better, more entertainingly, more personally.
The industry will keep talking about safety and cost for a while, and much of it rightly so. But the market ultimately belongs to those who build something people genuinely want. We build for the joy of buying. That is not defense. That is the attack.
Founder, Weidner Ventures
Dennis Weidner invests his own capital and his own work in digital ventures.