Ymatou, a Shanghai-based cross-border e-commerce platform, is beefing up efforts to provide supplies to live-streaming platforms and key opinion leaders (KOLs). Ymatou said it is banking on China’s rapidly growing segment of e-commerce via live-streaming to explore new opportunities. The company announced it has established a live-streaming supply chain department, which is to offer overseas products, bonded warehouses, cross-border logistics, Customs clearance and luxury products authentication. E-commerce that incorporates live-streaming has been gaining traction in China since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, as hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers were confined indoors and offline shopping moved online. “At present, the supply chain of products has become a key factor restricting the development of e-commerce via live-streaming,” said Zeng Bibo, Founder and CEO of Ymatou, adding that the pandemic has directly driven the integration of live-streaming and cross-border e-commerce, given that Chinese consumers could not go abroad to buy overseas products. According to Zeng, Ymatou has collaborated with short-video sharing platform Douyin and some KOLs, who promote products to their audiences through live-streaming.
The gross merchandise value of cross-border trade on Douyin has surged 200% per month. Zeng said Ymatou plans to cooperate with more live-streaming platforms, multichannel networks and KOLs, make more efforts to optimize the supply chain, improve the efficiency of logistics and distribution, and enhance consumer service. Sales revenue of China’s live-streamed e-commerce sector reached CNY961 billion last year, and is expected to rise to CNY1.2 trillion this year, according to a recent report from market consultancy iiMedia Research. China’s cross-border e-commerce sector has been growing exponentially over the past few years as the country’s middle and high-income shoppers are demanding increasingly diversified and personalized products and services.
Founded in 2010, Ymatou is a consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketplace engaged in cross-border e-commerce. So far, the site has over 116 million users in 627 cities in China and employs more than 100,000 overseas buyers in 83 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea and Australia. “Live-streaming offers a new operation model for online marketplaces, and could settle the problem of information asymmetry,” said Chen Tao, Analyst with internet consultancy Analysys in Beijing. Shopping via overseas live-streaming services could offer detailed product information to domestic consumers. The current trend is that more cross-border online retailers will cooperate with live-streaming platforms, the China daily reports.
