How Live-streaming Ecommerce Works in China

What: livestreamed e-commerce, a huge trend in China this year, combines two eminently addictive behaviors: livestreaming and online shopping. For 2-3 hours at a time, influencers, brand reps, and celebrities on platforms like Douyin (Chinese Tiktok), Weibo (Chinese Twitter), and Taobao (Alibaba’s flagship e-commerce site) introduce products, give demos, share discounts, and exhort viewers to buy. 

Why is this interesting: 

• It’s been incredibly effective: livestreamed e-commerce brought in roughly $130 billion in sales this year in China, up from $63 billion in 2019, and featured heavily in the 11/11 Singles shopping day (Chinese Black Friday.) 
• Meanwhile in the US, livestreaming still remains mostly the purview of video gamers; it hasn’t really penetrated e-commerce, and the numbers reflect that—the market is valued at only $5 billion. But given its success in China, Western platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Amazon, as well as a spate of startups, are looking to bring it to the U.S. in a big way.

In the rest of this article we will walk through the mechanics of livestreamed e-commerce in China: how are the streams discovered, what happens during a stream, who are the hosts, and how do they make money?