Top 50 leaders of live e-commerce in 2020

Recently, I've been making YouTube videos as a means of growing sales.  It’s a pretty usual way to get the word out about a product to a U.S. audience, but my Chinese friends are all advising me to open up an account on Taobao or Tik Tok to sell my products live. “You’ll make more money and you’ll make it faster than you can by making videos."

Make money! Make more money! Make money faster!

My Chinese friends tell me you can get rich overnight by selling your product live on the internet.

For the past two years, celebrities – and especially web celebrities – in China have begun selling goods live on e-commerce or social media platforms. Some sell their own products, while others – in something that’s becoming a very hot phenomenon in Chinese e-commerce – simply promote other people’s merchandise.

On a list of the 50 leaders of live-streaming for 2020, first place honors were taken by Taobao star Weiya, with sales of ¥38.6 billion (approximately $6 billion – that’s billion, not million.) Li Jiaqi, the runner-up, had sales of ¥25.2 billion ($4 billion), and Luo Yonghao, a newcomer on Douyin (Tik Tok), had sales of ¥2 billion ($310 million). Number-crunchers have figured that their commissions for a single live broadcast can reach ¥10 million ($1.55 million). Their annual incomes are just as impressive: Weiya made ¥11.5 billion ($1.8 billion) in 2020, while Li Jiaqi earned ¥3 billion ($460 million).

These astronomical figures can make you dizzy: Weiya and Li Jiaqi are veritable money-making machines at the top of China's e-commerce pyramid. Their extraordinary knack for selling live online has made them superstars. As a result, even ordinary citizens are joining the ranks of those selling merchandise on live video webcasts.

On one hand, this isn’t too different from direct-marketing TV outlets like QVC that have been around for decades. Only now, with the help of live webcasting technology on the internet, Chinese hosts go into the studio to sell clothing, shoes, accessories, beauty aids and even basic daily necessities via live video feed.

China's major e-commerce platforms launched live-streaming sales in 2019. Ordering merchandise while watching webcasts on live-streaming platforms without leaving home has become a new way of life for many Chinese.

In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, with billions of people stuck at home, celebrities and businesspeople alike were scrambling to get in on the action. On April Fool's Day 2020, internet celebrity Luo Yonghao made a high-profile entry into the field by live-streaming on Douyin e-commerce; that took the industry to new heights. That same month, Liang Jianzhang, founder of China Ctrip, joined the movement. Later in 2020, Chen Gang, founder of Qunar, and Wang Yu of Spring Airlines also entered the webcast studio to sell their product. And Dong Mingzhu, chairman of Gree Electric Appliances, a company with 30 years of tradition behind it, has broadcast 13 live shows, with sales of ¥47.6 billion ($7.36 billion.)

China’s top e-commerce anchors make making money look so easy that marketing courses for young people are springing up everywhere on the Chinese internet. Some teach how to make your own live broadcasts, while others supposedly teach you how to become a web celebrity, as though making money were as simple as yi, er, san.

The reality is that the road to riches for top video anchors is anything but plain sailing. Years of professional experience and a few hard knocks are required to achieve the kind of sales someone like Weiya commands in today’s e-marketplace.

Weiya was born in 1986 has had many different incarnations, not all of them successful. At one point, she and her husband opened an online shop on Taobao’s Tmall and it failed. Over the years, she has been a women’s clothing store owner, a singer-artist, an online shop owner and, now, she is Taobao’s live-streaming superstar. After 16 years of often slow progress, she is China's top video anchor.

In addition to being highly photogenic and dynamic on camera, she is extremely hard-working, savvy about how to present herself and extremely careful in her product choices. She is the gold standard e-commerce professional.

She began as a Taobao anchor in 2016, and she is part of a retail machine that works twenty-four hours a day. Because she appears live in the evenings, Weiya’s workday reverses day and night: she usually gets up at 4 p.m., starts her broadcast at 8 p.m., and finishes at midnight. Then she meets with her investment team to try out new products, leaves work at 6 or 7 a.m. the next morning, eats breakfast, then sleeps into the afternoon. Her work schedule is so demanding that she only gets to spend one day a month with her daughter.

Working with a team of over 200 people, Weiya has truly seized the opportunities the e-commerce era offers.

As for Li Jiaqi, he is still under 30 and once sold 15,000 lipsticks in 15 minutes and 5,000 units of Shiseido Essence lotion in 3 minutes, resulting in a gross sales from those items alone in excess of ¥6 million ($930,000.)

He was not an overnight sensation; he needed ten years to find his niche. Born in 1992, he comes from a middle-class family in Hunan province. His mother is a primary school teacher and his father works in the banking industry. In 2011, he entered Nanchang University as a dance major. After graduation, not wanting to be a professional dancer, he worked at a L'Oréal counter until the end of 2016.

He has an expertise with makeup that most women would envy. Racks containing more than 2,000 lipsticks are part of the set for his broadcasts; mention a color to him and he’ll find it for you in three seconds. He understands the needs of his female customers, and, more importantly, he understands how to communicate with them. That's the secret to his popularity with female viewers.

Now he not only sells beauty products, but also everything from snacks and instant breakfasts to quilts and bath towels, and from eyeglass frames to seemingly anything else in each of his three-to-four hour live broadcasts. There is a team of more than 300 people behind Li, and, at the rate his business is growing, it truly seems as though the sky’s the limit. He once said that his dream in the future is to create an independent e-commerce brand. However, in the current e-commerce environment in China, being live anchor will probably turn out to be the more lucrative alternative.

In 2021, live-streaming e-commerce will enter its 2.0 era in China. In the next annual list of the Top 50 Chinese e-commerce anchors, there are going to be many new faces, as new stars are continuously emerging onto the scene. What will the future hold?

CEO Jiang Fan of Taobao, explains that Weiya “can appear on a live broadcast with millions of viewers and sell hundreds of millions of yuan in merchandise. This is going to be China's future mainstream business model."

I’ve been wondering why there are no online celebrity spokespeople like Weiya, Li Jiaqi or Luo Yonghao in the United States. YouTube, Facebook and Instagram offer live-streaming functions, but no one in the U.S. seems to be using them as the basis for live selling.

There are a few exceptions, like the controversial Jeffree Star, one of the best-known beauty influencers in the industry (and who, despite his appearance, also happens to be a man.) He was first discovered by singer/producer Akon who hailed him “the next Lady Gaga”, but he left the music industry in 2013 for reasons that remain mysterious to this day. In 2014 he launched an e-commerce makeup brand, Jeffree Starr Cosmetics, and skyrocketed to fame by producing beauty tutorials on YouTube.

Starr’s YouTube “tutorials” may be only slightly veiled commercials for product he then sells through an online store, but he doesn’t webcast live.  American web celebrities’ videos are well-made and often have a finish worthy of Hollywood or MTV. They rack up large numbers of views on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, and have acquired huge followings across those platforms. Weiya’s online “shows” may not have the production values of these American videos, but there’s no arguing with success. Whether Americans will embrace live-streamed selling across the internet has yet to be seen; there can certainly be no doubt that, in China, this new age of direct marketing is proving itself to be a gold mine.

The Chinese live-streaming direct sales paradigm seems astonishingly lucrative, and makes you wonder why you didn’t think of it yourself. I was a fan of QVC for quite a few years, so I understand the concept of bonding with on-air hosts and, while enjoying their company in the living room, buying a lot of product along the way. I can imagine that personalities like Weiya and Li Jiaqi make similarly good company – the only difference is that the reach of cable television can’t be compared to that of the internet. Anyone in China can access Taobao; no wonder the sky seems to be the limit as far as live-streaming e-commerce is concerned.

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