LIVE-STREAMING SALES OPEN NEW E-COMMERCE VISTAS

Three kilometers away from the Yiwu International Trade City in East China's Zhejiang province, the world's largest small commodity wholesale market, Beixiazhu village is known by locals as the playground for internet celebrity live broadcasting.

The village does not have an attractive appearance at first sight, and one can't imagine how it becomes the storm front of China's internet celebrity economy. More than 1,000 micro-business brands and their 50,000 employees live in the village's 99 commercial buildings and 1,200 residential houses.

In the past two years, with the rise of e-commerce, live streaming platforms have become one of the most effective marketing tools, and there are more than 5,000 internet celebrities in Beixiazhu village alone.

In the narrow street that looks unremarkable or even slightly shabby belie the storefronts, in which the daily wealth story is staged with the ever-changing business opportunities.

Four-and-a-half-story houses can be seen everywhere in the village, the typical residence of what the locals call the gold seekers, and most of the signboards on their front door read "live broadcast" and "internet trending". In front of the door park Mercedes-Benz, as well as cargo tricycles. The upper half of the building is used as the bedroom, the lower three floors serve as the storage warehouse, and the underground floor is dedicated to live broadcasting.

If you step into a store, you can almost for sure catch someone broadcast live. LED light-compensating lamp, tripods, mobile phones, and large-capacity power banks are prerequisite for live broadcast. A variety of commodities are stacked next to them, and the young lady stands alone in front of her mobile phone to elaborate on the various functions of a product.

In the next store, a smiling auntie cooks casually in front of a dozen or so mobile phones, and in the adjoining room a tattooed young man starts his live streaming in an artsy-fartsy fashion. They come from all corners of the country. From young people under the age of 20 to middle-aged uncles. They scatter their imagination in front of their little screen with ingenious selling tactics.

Tens of thousands of live-streaming practitioners gather here in the village who are sensitive to business trend, and their acute sense for the upcoming trending hot-sellers is cemented by their collaboration that has produce a synergy effect. The smart merchant from the supply chain can quickly integrate factory capacity according to market demand, and maximize the scale effect of particular products with the best cost advantage. A number of third-party technology companies are also chipping in. They take advantage of AI, big data resources to excavate and analyze user behaviors to hunter down hot-selling potentials.

Any hot-selling items had a prelude before it becomes popular on the internet. These products must have been verified in niche markets. For example, the popular "cat claw cup" did not become an internet sensation until a swarm of comments followed when the video clip went viral and merchants with keen senses immediately found that there were no such products on the market. The next week saw 300,000 such units on the market.

Some of the top performers can transform their marketing talent into profits by earning more than 2 million yuan ($280,580) a year, and grassroots web anchors are hoping to achieve their "great leap". But it's easy to be an underdog with a chip on your shoulder, it's much harder to meet expectations when you expect greatness.

According to the State Post Bureau, in the first half of 2019, Yiwu ranked second with a total of 2.364 billion pieces of express delivery after Guangzhou's 2.926 billion, and significantly exceeded the third place of Shenzhen's 1.877 billion. The Yiwu municipal government and Alibaba formally signed an eWTP strategic cooperation agreement last year to jointly incubate a new trade model.

Photos by Yang Yifan

For China Daily