Helm › Helm University › Track 8 › Lesson 8.2
Lesson 8.2Shopping mode, and the rail that finds you
One switch, and the only thing it really buys you is a place on a rail.
Prefer to listen? This is the same lesson, word for word. The text below is the transcript.
This lesson prepares you to: Switch a stream into shopping mode and understand exactly what that changes.
The switch
A Helm stream is either social or shopping. New streams start social. Flipping to shopping tells every connected viewer immediately.
What it actually changes is narrower than it sounds, so here it is precisely.
| Shopping mode changes | Shopping mode does not change |
|---|---|
| Your show appears on the live shopping rail | Your fees |
| Viewers are told the mode changed | Your payout hold |
| How orders are handled | |
| Whether you can stage or pin products |
The rail
The Shop page carries a rail of live shopping shows happening right now. Each card shows how many people are watching and how many products you have staged, which is deliberately the signal for where the action is.
The viewer count is people seen in the last 30 seconds, so it is genuinely live rather than a running total.
Family safety rules apply to who sees you. A kid viewer only sees family only shows from somebody in their family. Adult creators are excluded from what kid and teen viewers see. Everyone else sees public, discoverable shows.
You can stage and pin without shopping mode
Worth knowing because it is a genuine quirk: staging and pinning do not check the mode at all. You can pin a product on a social stream and it will broadcast to viewers exactly as it would on a shopping one. The mode is what gets you onto the rail, not what unlocks the tools.
And they do not check the stream is live either
Staging and pinning work on a stream in any state, including one that has already ended. Pinning a product to a finished stream will broadcast the event to nobody. This is a rough edge rather than a feature, so make sure you are working on the stream you think you are.
What the rail cannot tell you
There is no live sales figure anywhere. Helm records no link between an order and the stream it came from, so you cannot report on what a show sold. Lesson 8.5 covers what that means and how to work around it.