With Christmas and the traditional consumption season in the West around the corner, live-stream shopping, fueled by a surge in at-home shopping during the Covid-19 pandemic, is quickly gaining popularity among Western consumers - and a new sales channel and growth point for Chinese vendors. TikTok is expected to launch its live shopping service in the U.S. during the Christmas holiday, following launches in the UK and Indonesia earlier this year, several Chinese cross-border live-streaming agencies told the Global Times. While the Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted the global economy, it has also accelerated the digitalization of trade. The value of the global cross-border e-commerce industry has increased by 20% in 2020, according to the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Compared with the more mature sector in China, live-stream shopping is still in its infancy in the West but is gaining pace.
“On Black Friday, we did live-streaming on Amazon from 8 am to 12 am midnight with no break. The schedule for live-streaming in December is also full, with six to eight sessions a day," Feng Xuefeng, Manager at SakTok, a cross-border live-streaming agency based in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, told the Global Times. Feng said sales through live-streaming on Amazon U.S. have increased 10-fold since it started about a year ago. “Last year, our sales stood at hundreds of dollars for each live-streaming session. Now, it's thousands of dollars,” he said.
"The most frequent interaction we have with foreign viewers concerns price," Xiao said, with live-streaming prices about 15% to 30% cheaper than on the website. The most popular items of live-streaming sales are 3C products and clothes. Liu Chang, founder of MADEINRED, an e-commerce live-streaming company that helps Chinese brands sell overseas through TikTok, said that cross-border sales are expanding quickly, and many Chinese brands have invested a lot to promote their brands. “My clients include domestic phone makers Xiaomi and Lenovo. Some brands would offer prices as low as GBP1.99 for a headset to seize the market,” Liu said. Since the company started live-streaming on TikTok in the UK market in July, sales have risen five-fold every month. “We are optimistic about growth. The whole TikTok live-streaming sector in the U.S. is still in the internal testing stage. It is estimated that the opening of the U.S. market will unleash dozens of times more consumption power than the British market,” Liu said, adding that TikTok's live-streaming sales could be fully rolled out in the U.S. around Christmas or the first quarter next year. The development prospects of live broadcasting in the European and U.S. markets are gaining pace, with more people beginning to accept the new form of shopping, industry insiders said.
