You went live, somebody typed a word in your chat, and a few seconds later they had bought something. Two companies sell you that minute. Same word, same chat, same three places: Facebook Live, Instagram Live, TikTok Live.
One of them tells you what happens to that buyer afterwards. The other one does not.
SoldLive puts it on its Shopify App Store listing, in the plainest words a marketing page ever manages: “Shoppers buy through your Shopify checkout: you keep the customer and the sale.”
CommentSold’s pricing page says a great deal. It says $149 a month for the entry plan. It says plus 6 percent of sales. It says you get a website builder, your own iOS and Android app, and an invoice that goes out the second somebody comments. Across nine of its pages, the thing it never says is who ends up holding the customer.
That is not an accusation. It is a gap. And gaps on a pricing page are rarely accidents.
So before you pick one of these, or any tool that sits between you and the people who watch you, there is a question worth asking first, and it is not what the thing costs.
Read the page for what it leaves out
Here is what CommentSold does say, in its own words. The invoice is theirs: “When a shopper comments to buy, CommentSold automatically sends the invoice, making checkout seamless and easy.” The store is theirs: “Turn your brand into a powerful online storefront with CommentSold’s Website Creator.” The payments are theirs, at 2.9 percent plus 30 cents a transaction, refunded from their dashboard. And the shopper signs up with them, because the Facebook selling page lists the job as “direct new customers to register”.
Invoice, checkout, storefront, payments, registration. Five parts of one transaction, all running on somebody else’s system. Nobody has to write “we keep the customer” for that sentence to be true. You can assemble it from the feature list.
Compare that with what SoldLive writes about itself: “Checkout stays on Shopify. All orders, inventory, and payments flow through your store.” There is no SoldLive storefront to send anyone to. Its own phone app is a tool for the seller, an overlay you put on your stream, not a shop for the buyer to install.
The bill tells you the same story
Look at how each one charges, because pricing models are honest even when pages are not.
CommentSold takes $149 a month and 6 percent of your sales at the entry tier, $499 and 5 percent above that, $999 and 4 percent at the top. Card fees are extra. A percentage of sales is a partnership. It only makes sense if the platform believes it is generating the sale, which is a reasonable thing to believe when the platform owns the store, the app and the checkout.
SoldLive charges a flat fee and says so twice: “No percentage of sales. No hidden fees. Just a flat rate based on your order volume and the live sale features you need.” It starts at $35 a month for 35 live sale orders, and the Shopify listing runs up to $300. Its own site goes further, to $3,000 for unlimited orders.
One model scales with your revenue. The other scales with your order count and then stops. Neither is wrong. But a company that takes a share of every sale has to believe it helped make the sale, and a company that charges the same whether you sell one thing or a thousand does not need to believe that. The two price lists are two answers to who the customer belongs to.
This is not a story about two vendors
Be fair to CommentSold here, because the picture is more complicated than that. The same company sells a separate Shopify product called Videeo, and on that one the arrangement flips: “All live streams and live-replay orders are processed through your Shopify Cart.” So this is not a company with a philosophy. It is a company with two products, and the difference between them is exactly the thing we are talking about.
Which is the useful part. The question is not “which of these two is better”, because that depends on whether you already have a store, how much you sell, and whether a branded app is worth 6 percent to you. Plenty of people should pick the all-in-one. Running your own storefront is work, and paying somebody to do it is a real answer.
The question is whether you know which one you picked.
The question
Take any tool that sits between you and your audience. Not just selling tools. Anything that handles the moment where a viewer becomes a name, an email address, a payment.
Ask it: after this transaction, whose list is that person on?
If the answer is on the pricing page in plain words, good. One of the two managed it in a single sentence, which means it can be done, and that the company decided the answer was a selling point. If you have to work it out from the feature list instead, you have still got your answer. It is just that nobody wanted to write it down.
And if you find you cannot tell at all, that is worth ten minutes today, while the number of people involved is still small enough to move.
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