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QVC’s bringing its always-on home shopping network to a TikTok livestream near you. The company announced Wednesday that it would host nonstop shopping livestreams on the app, the first of their kind on TikTok in the U.S. and part of a strategic agreement with the video-sharing platform, which is itself facing a critical moment. Its once-delayed ban is looming. But broadcast TV shopping needs to pivot to survive, and QVC sees TikTok as one of the best avenues to do that. “QVC and HSN hosts have mastered live shopping moments for decades and we’re thrilled to bring this entertaining shopping experience to TikTok’s community,” TikTok Shop’s head of U.S. operations Nico Le Bourgeois said in a statement. QVC Group, which runs the home shopping channels QVC and HSN, launched on TikTok Shop in 2024, but 24/7 live social shopping experiences represent a deeper push onto the app just days before it could go offline. TikTok could again be banned in the U.S. on Saturday if it doesn’t find a new American owner. QVC Group says on television it reaches more than 200 million homes, but with live TV viewing in decline, it’s had to invest in other platforms to reach a new generation of shoppers. The company has its own QVC+ and HSN+ streaming services as well as accounts on social networking sites like TikTok, where it has nearly half a million followers. QVC says more than 74,000 creators on TikTok have featured their items in shoppable videos or livestreams since last August. In some sense, TikTok and QVC’s UX are completely synergistic. The partnership retrofits the live, long-form linear tv format that made QVC famous in a context that’s familiar with young people today: an endless feed of people hawking goods. (TikTok videos are a less bite-sized as it is: uploaded videos can be up to 60 minutes long.) The company claims that bringing its approach to sales on social at this scale will revolutionize the space. Citing its expertise putting on “large-scale, high-volume, live social shopping,” QVC Group president and CEO David Rawlinson II said in a statement the company will bring to the endeavor its lineup of celebrities, hosts, brands, and products. “Our agreement will be a catalyst to transform shopping and discovery, not only for QVC Group and TikTok Shop, but also for social shopping at large,” he said. But first, they have to break-even. QVC Group ended Q4 with an almost $1.3 billion operating loss, and ended its year with an 8% drop in total revenue. Social media companies have worked to grow their shopping capabilities, but social shopping hasn’t taken hold in the U.S. to the extent that it has in other countries. Social commerce accounted for nearly 30% of all e-commerce in China last year, compared to less than 6% in the U.S., according to data from eMarketer. If QVC can successfully translate its experience selling products on TV to a smaller screen, though, that figure could grow.
Category:
E-Commerce
As of this year, EV chargers now outnumber gas pumps in the state of California. The state has an estimated 178,000 shared chargers for electric carsnot counting another 700,000 private chargers that are installed in single-family homes, according to the California Energy Commission. Thats compared to roughly 120,000 gas pumps across the state. The number of EV chargers nearly doubled since 2023, though part of the increase came from identifying charging stations that hadnt previously been counted. The official stats include both public chargers and those that are shared at workplaces or in apartment buildings. Its still only a fraction of the number of chargers that are coming. By the most recent estimate, California will need around 1 million public and shared private chargers by 2030, enough to support the estimated 7 million light-duty electric vehicles that may be on the road by then. By 2035, when a rule requiring new vehicles to be electric will go into effectthe state could need more than 2 million shared EV chargers. (That’s assuming the rule survives Trump’s attempts to kill it.) For drivers who own a house with a garage, charging overnight at home can easily cover most needs. Still, those drivers obviously need access to public chargers for longer trips. And around 45% of Californians are renters who dont have garages of their own. New building codes require new apartment buildings to make parking spaces EV ready, and also apply to existing parking spaces when older buildings are renovated or expanded. Renters also have the right to install chargers themselves when they have a designated parking space. The rules also require a certain number of parking spaces at motels and retail and commercial parking lots to be EV ready. “Retrofitting the existing stock of multifamily dwellings with chargers is a substantial challenge,” says Esther Conrad, a research manager at Stanford University who has studied the rollout of EV chargers. Charging EVs takes substantially longer than filling up with gas, which is the main reason so why more charging ports are needed than gas pumpsboth in order to prevent bottlenecks at charging stations and because chargers are used in different places, from parking lots to street parking in cities. But as charging tech and vehicles improve, the total number of chargers that are needed is likely to shrink from current estimates, says Harrison Reilly, a spokesperson for the California Energy Commission. (In China, tech is already much farther ahead, with some new cars capable of charging in roughly as quickly as it takes to pump gas.) The state will publish a new estimate of charging needs later this year. For the moment, Reilly says, there are enough chargers to support the number of light-duty EVs that are on California roads. That’s a major milestone; with nearly 2 million electric cars and light-duty trucks, California also has more EVs than any other state. Last year, around 25% of all new car sales there were electric. Other states can learn from California’s policy. “First, states should be developing clear and ambitious EV targets, especially as the federal government pulls back on some of the targets for the transition,” says Jeff Prosserman, CEO and cofounder of Voltpost, a company that converts streetlights so they can double as curbside EV chargers. “They were leading the charge by looking to have as a mandate 100% of new car sales to be electric by 2035.” The state’s requirement for new apartment buildings to add EV chargers is critical. It has also provided important financial support, including grants to add chargers in disadvantaged neighborhoods, and has pushed to help streamline permitting so projects can be built faster. There are still obstacles as it moves forward. “One of the big challenges is the need for additional grid capacity to handle all of the charging,” says Conrad, though the state is trying to help address that. She says that even more funding is needed to add chargers in some locations where private developers might not otherwise build them. As the Trump administration tries to cancel promised support for EV chargers, it puts more financial pressure on the state. But the network is still quickly growing now. Voltpost, for example, is moving forward on a project to add curbside EV chargers in some neighborhoods in San Francisco. “It’s in no way impacted by federal policyit’s state and city-driven,” says Prosserman. “From what we’ve seen at Voltpost, progressive states like California are going to continue providing funding opportunities to meet their climate targets with or without support from the federal government,” he says.
Category:
E-Commerce
Four years ago, if you found yourself at one particular intersection of Buenos Aires, you would see a nondescript, three-story parking garage with no cars inside. That building still existsbut its completely unrecognizable. Today, that structure looks like a stubby, UFO-like tower mushrooming from a concrete pedestal with a landscaped ramp curving upward. The metamorphosis is thanks to a multiyear project by New York architecture firm ODA. Ola Palermo, as the reimagined structure is known, has become a mixed-use building with cafés, restaurants, and Class A office space. The cherry on top of this (concrete) cake is an open-air promenade that peels off the sidewalk, winds up to what used to be the roof of the garage, blossoms into a rooftop park, then winds back down to the other side of the building. In a structure once defined by cars, the ramp is now be synonymous with people.[Photo: Alan Karchmer/courtesy ODA]To demolish or not to demolishODA (ranked among the Worlds Most Innovative Companies of 2025 by Fast Company) has a history of working on adaptive reuse projects, including Detroits Book Tower and 10 Jay Street in Brooklyn, but when founder Eran Chen first heard about the project from real estate firm BSD Investments, it was presented to him as an empty site.The building, which had been vacant for years, sits on a tricky plot sandwiched between two busy roads and an elevated train line. It is very close to the edge of Tres de Febrero Park (also known as Bosques de Palermo, or Palermo Woods), but before ODA got involved the two were not connected. [Image: courtesy ODA]Before arriving on-site, Chen had considered demolishing the parking garage, but when he saw the building, the idea just clicked. The building immediately captured my imagination, Chen says, noting the first thing that surprised him was the structures ceiling height. Most parking garages have low ceilings, which makes them challenging to convertthis one had a 14- to 15-foot ceiling. (For perspective: Most homes have 8- to 9-foot ceilings.) The ceiling had a waffle design, which looks like a grid of intersecting beams that create a pattern of recessed squares. This helped distribute the weight of the ceiling evenly, allowing it to span large areas without the need for additional columns for support, and creating a more open and flexible space for the buildings use. [Photo: Alan Karchmer/courtesy ODA]To top it all off, the roof afforded a clear 360-degree view. On one side, you could see through Palermo Woods, all the way to downtown Buenos Aires. On the other, theres a private racetrack and polo fields that people can visit only if they have exclusive memberships. On one side you have the haves, and on the other, you have everybody else, and this is smack dab in between the two, says Chen. He saw the rooftop as an opportunity to turn the tables and allow the parks visitors to look down on the exclusive grounds and catch a (free) glimpse of any events that take place there.[Photo: Alan Karchmer/courtesy ODA]Form follows experiencesODA kept 80% of the original structure to create a 160,000-square-foot building. A quarter of this surfaceabout 40,000 square feetis dedicated to public terraces, green spaces, and the open-air promenade. The rest is taken up by restaurants, cafés, and retail spaces. Parking for 250 cars is also available on the ground floor. But the program, or function, of the building wasnt always clear. The area isnt zoned for residential use, and commercial use wasnt the obvious choice, says Chen, as most companies who could afford rent for a modern office building would opt for a space in downtown Buenos Aires. Retail, which thrives on heavy footfall, wasnt obvious either since the site is so isolated and on the edge of the city.[Photo: Alan Karchmer/courtesy ODA]But for many years now, Chen has ben honing a new mantra. Form should not follow function anymore. Form should follow experiences, he says. If we design buildings for the human experience, people will visit these buildingsand enjoy themregardless of the program. In other words, build it and they will come? I ask. Build it well and they will come, he says. An important distinction. To turn the building into an irresistible destination, ODA made four incisions. They carved out one courtyard to let light into the widest part of the building, and shaved off slivers of the facade to make room for two sets of stairs and the ramp.These incisions amount to 20% of the floor area, but the architects didnt lose that space; they redistributed it. At one end of the building, there once was a water tower that rose above the areas height restrictions. The tower was obsolete, so Chen convinced the city to remove it. In its place, Chens team built a four-story tower based on the memory of the water tower. This concrete mushroom as he calls it, now rises above the rest of the structure, holding its most premium office spaces.[Photo: Alan Karchmer/courtesy ODA]A blueprint for the U.S.The resulting building is what Chen calls a win-win-win. It benefits city agencies because it makes a meaningful contribution to the public realm. It benefits the local community, which now has access to a public rooftop park. And it benefits the developer, who saved on construction costs (no new foundations were required) by not demolishing the building.It also benefits the environment, since giving buildings a second chance, as Chen puts it, can help lower the environmental footprint associated with building anew. (Though there could be costs associated with bringing an old building up to code.) Cities are filled with structures that are either dated or unnecessary, and of course, a big chunk of it is parking garages, Chen says.Already, architects are starting to build future-proof parking garages like this multistory car park in Calgary, Alberta, that was specifically designed to transform into a 600-person office or 50-unit residential building if (and when) the need arises. But Chen believes that residential and commercial are not the only options, especially if the buildings ceilings are low, as they often are. He includes indoor/outdoor sports venues, like pickleball courts; urban farms; and even open-air markets among the possibilities. The key, he says, is not to be fixated on the obvious programs that people might think of.
Category:
E-Commerce
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