Social media influencers often look for new ways to showcase brands and products on their channels to make money. However, a Chinese live streamer named Zheng Xiang Xiang seems to have left them all behind – she raked in a whopping 100 million yuan (Dh51.8 million) in sales in just seven days, earlier this month.
Xiang Xiang went viral with a very unique method. The streamer posts live videos on Douyin (China’s version of TikTok) of herself showing off various products for just three seconds each.
According to the Singaporean website 8days.sg, Xiang Xiang wears a black halter dress like the one donned by Chinese actress Gina Jin in the 2023 film 'No More Bet' and is known for her deadpan and sped-up way of introducing products.
Her videos show her standing in a room full of orange boxes that look very similar to the signature Hermès box.
An assistant passes her the products box by box, which she unboxes, holds up for a second, and states the price before pushing the box away. That’s all she does. There is no upselling.
“Honestly, if you blink, you probably would have missed the item completely,” the article added.
The boxes might make you think she is selling luxury products, however, reportedly, all the items are priced below 10 yuan (Dh5.18).
This implies that the influencer managed to sell approximately ten million units in one week to have earned 100 million yuan (Dh51.8 million).
While Xiang Xiang went viral only in November this year, she has been in the live stream business since 2017. In the first week of November, her follower count crossed a million, making her a known face in the Douyin e-commerce industry.
Known as ‘e-commerce live streaming’, the phenomenon started in China in 2016.
Today, tens of millions of internet users in China shop through live streaming. Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce behemoth that has acquired businesses throughout Asia, is at the center of it all.
According to the global data platform, statista.com: “E-commerce is the most popular type of live streaming in China, with about 526 million users as of June 2023 accounting for about 48.8 per cent of the country's internet population. Streaming platforms Taobao, Douyin, and Kuaishou are the prominent players in China's live commerce market.”
The country also leads the global e-commerce market GlobalData.com, a data analytics platform, according to a GlobalData report: “Bolstered by a remarkable 9.9 per cent growth, the Chinese e-commerce market is anticipated to surge to 15.2 trillion yuan (Dh7.8 trillion) in 2023, driven by the ongoing shift of consumer preferences from offline to online shopping.”
