Carousell brings secondhand shopping to life with interactive live streaming powered by Agora

Live Shopping

Carousell shopper browsing secondhand listings on the mobile marketplace

Problem

Delivering high-quality, low-latency, and stable live commerce streams at scale

Solution

Agora Interactive Live Streaming supports responsive product showcases and buyer-seller engagement

Results

6x growth in GMV and bidders in 5 months

4x growth in viewers in 5 months

13x growth in live shows, with 5x growth in sellers going live per month

Smooth video playback and stable live sessions for hosts and viewers

About Carousell

Making secondhand the first choice across Greater Southeast Asia

Carousell is part of Carousell Group, the leading multi-category platform for buying and selling secondhand goods in Greater Southeast Asia. Founded in Singapore in 2012, the Group has a leading presence in seven markets through brands including Carousell, Carousell Media Group, Cho Tot, Laku6, LuxLexicon, Mudah.my, OneShift, REFASH and Revo Financial, serving tens of millions of monthly active users.

The Carousell marketplace is available in Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Taiwan, spanning categories such as cars, lifestyle, gadgets and fashion accessories. Its teams across Southeast Asia, India, Taiwan and Hong Kong use technology—including advances in AI—to make buying and selling pre-loved items safer, easier and more convenient, online and offline.

Carousell app screens showing live shows, secondhand products, and selling options

The Problem

Building live commerce that feels immediate, reliable and ready to scale

As Carousell explored new live commerce opportunities, it needed a real-time streaming foundation that could preserve the energy and immediacy of a live sale. Sellers needed to showcase products clearly, while buyers needed to follow the action and participate without a laggy or disrupted experience.

That made stream quality, low latency, and session stability critical. Carousell also wanted an implementation path that would fit its product ecosystem, perform smoothly under varying network conditions, and provide room to expand live commerce into more categories and use cases over time.

Key challenges

Delivering smooth, low-latency video for active real-time participation

Maintaining stable sessions as hosts and viewers connect under different network conditions

Integrating real-time engagement efficiently across web and mobile experiences

Creating a scalable foundation for future live commerce growth

FRONTEND	React, Swift and Kotlin
CLOUD / INFRASTRUCTURE	Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
AI / LLM INTEGRATION	Claude and Gemini

The Solution

A responsive real-time foundation for Carousell Live Selling

Carousell integrated Agora’s real-time engagement technology to support live streaming experiences across selected marketplace categories, including toys and collectibles—such as trading card games—and luxury and fashion, with the flexibility to extend the format to other categories.

Agora provides the real-time video foundation that enables sellers to demonstrate products live and engage buyers as the show unfolds. The implementation delivers smooth video playback and stable sessions, helping hosts and viewers connect without disruption and making multi-user engagement feel responsive and natural.

Around that live video experience, Carousell has designed commerce features to support how its community buys and sells. Live bidding creates excitement for sought-after trading cards, rare drops, and luxury goods. An automated anti-snipe timer helps prevent last-second bids from unfairly deciding an auction, while requiring bidders to link a payment card and delivery address before bidding helps sellers reduce non-paying buyer ‘ghosting.’

Agora Products

Interactive Live Streaming Interactive Live Streaming

Why Carousell chose Agora:

High-quality, low-latency streaming for live product showcases and bidding

Stable real-time sessions that support a smooth buyer and seller experience

Straightforward integration with Carousell’s web and mobile technology ecosystem

A scalable platform that can support new live commerce categories and use cases

Carousell Live screens showing product discovery and a live trading-card auction

Results and ROI

More dynamic product discovery and stronger real-time participation

With Agora, Carousell introduced a live streaming experience built for active, real-time interaction. Sellers can present products in richer detail, while buyers can discover items, assess them in context, and participate as a sale unfolds.

Early feedback highlights the excitement of live bidding in categories such as trading card games and luxury goods. Buyers have responded positively to the anti-snipe mechanism, while sellers value pre-bid payment and delivery requirements that help reduce non-paying commitments.

Carousell launched live selling in Singapore, followed by Hong Kong and Malaysia. Over the first five months of the rollout, GMV and bidder numbers grew about 6x, viewer numbers about 4x, live shows about 13x, and the number of sellers going live each month about 5x. Over three months, GMV grew 2.5x and weekly viewership doubled.

Engagement remained steady as the audience grew: about 4% of viewers placed a bid, a rate that has held month-on-month, and each bidder placed an average of about 19 bids per show.

Results after implementing Agora: