#shoppable tv

[as-seen-on-fashion-blog]

Tahani (Jameela Jamil) wears this yellow and white tropical floral print off-the-shoulder dress in The Good Place episode “Derek”

ASOS Floral Bardot Maxi Dress - $33 (was $83)

[nickgerlich]

The TV Is The Store

About 25 years ago I read an interesting white paper from Accenture. Remember, this was long before smartphones, smart TVs, and smart appliances. About the only thing we had that was remotely smart was our Palm Pilot. If you owned one of these, you were pretty cool.

That white paper envisioned a time not far off in which they speculated shoppers could use their Palm Pilot or similar device to shop. But here’s where it gets a little creepy. Suppose you were sitting on a public bench outside your office building, and saw a person go by whose outfit you found particularly attractive. In this futuristic world you could simply point your Palm Pilot toward that person, and specifically at a particular garment. The onboard camera would scan it, find it online, and after a couple of taps and clicks, you could make it yours.

Wow. There’s a lot to unpack here, because Google reverse image search did not come along until only a few years ago. I guess if you can imagine it, you can make it reality.

I also read a paper in which our TV shows would literally be video showrooms of paid product placements. The idea of paid placements was not at all a new one, but when coupled with that Palm Pilot again, you could point to that Fortuny lamp in Monica’s apartment on Friends, and buy it.

Here we are in 2025, and none of this played out quite like the dreamers dreamed, but we’re getting there. In fact, shoppable TV is now a growing phenomenon. Why do you think that Walmart bought Vizio TV? Simple. So they could advertise products—and make them available for sale—on the home screen. Vizio is the third-highest selling brand of televisions in the US, and it is now a dedicated advertising platform for Walmart.

Generally speaking, though, shoppable TV has boiled down to QR codes that can be scanned, and then the featured item can be purchased. Amazon used it on Black Friday last year when it broadcast an NFL game. I have seen it on The Today Show. Kroger used it in a recent promotion on Hulu.

The stats are compelling. We have seen products featured on television for so long that we have come to accept it, and we use it to discover new items. And let’s face it: We are probably never more than a few feet from our phone, and may in fact have it in our hands. This makes shopping extremely easy, even easier than having to open an app or website on any device.

Although Roku found consumer engagement to be significantly higher when consumers are prompted to use their remote control instead of their phone, I see problems with that. It would be clunky entering my data to buy something, whereas scanning a QR code with my phone could easily link to my payments, and I could be done in seconds.

All of which means we had better be pretty careful waving our phones around the room! We might go on a shopping spree and not even know it.

The common thread connecting the Accenture paper with the shoppable TV of today is ease of shopping. The goal of marketers is to make it as simple as possible for us to buy things, almost as if on impulse. It is little different from all of the items we find surrounding the checkout stands in retail stores. While we are waiting in line, it is easy to be distracted when we are least expecting it. The same holds true for shoppable TV.

Amazon understands this well. It is hard to buy anything without also seeing a bundle of things that other people bought. Upselling is as old as the hills. Once again, the goal is to make it easy to buy more stuff.

Some things never change, and those folks at Accenture were pretty prescient. Maybe not perfect, but they saw a world in which it would be simple to shop. Thankfully, though, it’s nowhere near as creepy as the way they imagined.

Dr “Please Don’t Point At Me” Gerlich

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