SHANGHAI, July 13, 2020 — O’Ratings, a third party monitor, released the data of Chinese mid-year shopping festival on July 1st. It showed that live-stream shopping hit another new record in China, contributing 24.2 billion RMB (449.5 million US$) sales during the recent mid-year shopping campaign. Live streaming is becoming a staple of e-commerce product promotion.
Live stream shopping has been developed since 2016 by e-commerce platforms in China and set off an upsurge in 2018 when popular live-streamers could sell more than 300 million RMB (43 million US$) a year and their online viewers could reach 10 million at one time. During the pandemic, bridging the gap between the source of goods and consumers, the Chinese government encouraged people to use live-streaming to sell unsalable products caused by massive lockdowns and upgraded the live-stream shopping industry. Now live stream is indispensable for product marketing in China.
O’Ratings monitored 806,000 live streaming chat rooms across different platforms on June 18th, China’s mid-year shopping festival, and it showed that the amount of sales was over 3.5 billion RMB (500.6 million US$) and 412 million viewers watched live streams on that day. Taking the sales since the very beginning of 618 shopping campaign into account, the total sales was 24.2 billion RMB (3.4 billion US$). The top 3 best-selling categories on Taobao were jewelry, clothes and food, and the top 3 on Douyin (Chinese TikTok) were food, mother and baby products and cosmetics.
Five indexes O’Ratings are monitoring
- Live-streaming ratings
- Peak Viewers
- Market share
- Sales index
- Engagement index
Key findings of O’Ratings’ monitoring data
- Many brands pay celebrities a lot for product promotion, but professional live-streamers’ performance is much better than celebrities’. O’Ratings picks 30 popular live-streamers and 30 celebrities, and analyzes their 10 week live-streaming performance. It shows that professional live-streamers’ sales index was 8 times of celebrities’.
- Timing is very important when retailers choose live-streamers to sell products. After calculation, it finds that every product is sold at a fixed frequency. Those fast-consuming products have a higher frequency than durable ones. For example, snacks’ frequency is one day, while cellphone’s is 55 days. Because if a live-streamer sells cellphones today, the fans do not need to buy another phone for some time. When retailers promote their products by live stream, they should notice the time period of product and whether the live-streamer has sold the same kind of product recently.
- Non-standard product, like jade and pets, have great potential in live-streaming. With the live stream market taking shape, popular live-streamers who are preferred by retailers, occupy most of the market share. But they can not substitute live-streamers who sell unique products. For example, a baker streams how he makes a cake and sells it.
About O’Ratings
O’Ratings is a third party live-stream monitor. O’Ratings records live stream data across different platforms, analyzes the latest trend and provides insights of live stream industry.