To predict digital trends, the saying goes, look down and east. “Down,” as in your phone, and “east” as in China. Today, there’s yet another reason to look down and east.
Around the world, Chinese people are celebrating 2 things: the Year of the Ox and the year livestreamed ecommerce went BIG.
… viewed by 1B+ people. The star of the show was 36-year-old influencer Huang Wei, known as Viya, China’s livestream queen.
Spotlighting Viya shows China’s dead serious about leading the world in livestreamed ecommerce:
Think of China’s livestreamed shopping platforms as the intersection of QVC and TikTok. Anyone can be an influencer, offer fan discounts, and promote flash deals in real time.
Though influencers can sell practically anything (no joke, Viya sold a rocket launch service last year), Beijing is pushing influencers to promote nationally important products.
Many influencers promote local foods to help China’s 130m farm households. One platform says it even helped 5m sellers from China’s poorest villages market ~$3B in agricultural products in 2019.
In the US, we’re already seeing its early stages. Amazon launched an in-house QVC platform — Amazon Live — in 2019, and Walmart tested influencer-driven live shopping on TikTok in December.
It’s a good start, but to catch up with China’s 560m viewers, there’s clearly a ways to go.