The rise of live streaming, the boom of e-commerce

By Zhao Xinhua, Zhong Mengxia

In the 21st century with diverse information, e-commerce allows to shop and pay online, saving customers and enterprises' time and space, and greatly improving the trade efficiency. E- commerce has a remarkable market in China these year, which contributes to the prosperity of Alibaba Group and a lot of other services in a large extent, and it also brings great changes to the economy of China.

Live streaming for selling boom

Because of the pandemic this year, there are more emerging forms of e-commerce, and live streaming is one of them. Usually, anchors recommend their favorite products to people who watch the channels. For now, brands and celebrities will also collaborate with anchors to attract more people to watch. It is easy to understand, on the one hand, people have to keep the rules of distance and stay at home, on the other hand, instead of going outside, people need to find a way to relax themselves and have fun,therefore, living streaming is warmly welcomed by all ages of people.

According to news on July 30, the spokesperson of the Ministry of Commerce Gao Feng said at a regular press conference that live streaming has become a new engine for the development of e-commerce in 2020. According to business big data monitoring, in the first half of the year,e-commerce live broadcasts have already exceeded 10 million, the number of active anchors exceeded 400,000, the number of viewers exceeded 50 billion, and the number of products on sell exceeded 20 million.

Gao Feng also pointed out that online retail is conducive to the stability of the consumer market, with a continuous growth in scale and a more prominent role. From January to June, the national online retail sales of physical goods reached 4.35 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 14.3%.

Among them, the online retail sales of physical goods accounted for 25.2% of the total retail sales of consumer goods in the same period, an increase of 5.6 percentage points over the same period last year;the number of online shopping users nationwide increased by 100 million over the previous year; the number of stores on major online retail platforms increased by 3.8% year-on-year.

More digital procurement by Chinese enterprises

In addition to the changes in individual consumption behavior, a large part of Chinese enterprises turned to digital procurement. CCID (China Center for Information Industry Development ) and CIECC (China International Electronic Commerce Center) jointly released the “Chinese Enterprise Digital Procurement Development Report 2019” (hereinafter referred to as the“Report”). Te Report shows that in 2019, China’s enterprise-level e-commerce market transaction volume was 20.46 trillion yuan, an increase of 1.5% over the previous year; and the enterprise digital procurement market was 590 billion yuan, a year-on-year growth rate of up to 64%, becoming new driving force for the development of enterprise-level e-commerce. Te Report predicts that by 2020, China’s enterprises’ digital procurement will maintain rapid growth, and the scale of transactions is expected to exceed one trillion yuan.

Cross-border e-commerce exports increase

Due to the globalization and the pandemic, the cross-border e-commerce exports increased a lot, especially in terms of protective products such as masks and etc. In July, Gao Feng, a spokesman for the Ministry of Commerce, introduced that in recent years, as a new foreign trade format,cross-border e-commerce retail exports have been booming, which has played an active role in opening up overseas markets, and stabilizing employment for small and medium sized enterprises. In 2019, total crossborder e-commerce retail exports increased by 60% year-on-year. Even though in this hardest time - the first five months of 2020, cross-border ecommerce retail exports still rose against the trend, up 12% year-on-year.In the next step, in order to push the e-commerce steps up further, the Ministry of Commerce will continue to enhance policy, system, management and service innovation, and accelerate the healthy and orderly development of cross-border e-commerce.