Rice, sausages, toy cars: On Chinese online platforms like Douyin, livestream shoppers sell goods every second. A huge market with an estimated turnover of 450 billion euros last year.
Live streamer Zheng Xiangxiang even made it onto social media outside of China with her sales appearances. She became known for only holding the goods up to the camera for a few seconds at a time. Her assistants give her shoes, clothes, cosmetics and so on, she briefly opens the box, says the price and continues.
Zheng Xiangxiang has around five million followers on Douyin, the Chinese equivalent of the short video app TikTok. According to reports, the young live streamer earned the equivalent of more than ten million euros a week. In October, the Douyin platform banned this type of livestreaming in which you don’t learn anything about the product, but the market is huge and for many famous influencers in China, livestream shopping is a secondary or even the main source of income.
Integrated shopping function on social media
Shopping functions are directly integrated into social media platforms such as Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Kuaishou and Bilibili. This means that users who have landed on a live stream shopping channel can buy the products directly in the smartphone app with just a few clicks. Sales platforms like Taobao have their own live streaming channels, as does the messaging app WeChat.
Almost everything is sold live in China; on a WeChat channel, a woman prepares sausages and offers them for sale at the same time. Once you swipe up to the next channel, a man is live selling toy cars, which he fills into large buckets with his hands.
Live streamers in sales boxes
In many cities there are special buildings in which dozens of small boxes without windows are lined up, sometimes over several floors, in which live streamers sit who sell their products online. Many are employed by one of the almost 20,000 e-commerce live streaming companies, others are self-employed.
Live online shopping has been around in China for around eight years, and since then the market has continued to grow – especially during the pandemic, when particularly strict Covid rules applied in China for almost three years. According to the “China Live Streaming E-Commerce Market Data Report”, there are now an estimated 500 million live shopping users who shop online in the People’s Republic – more than one in three in China. The equivalent of around 450 billion euros was generated through livestream shopping last year. This roughly corresponds to the gross domestic product of Austria.
Benjamin Eyssel, ARD Beijing, tagesschau, November 27th, 2023 10:00 a.m