He demonstrates and recommends the products of multiple companies and is paid according to the sales he generates. A former beauty adviser at L’Oréal, he has phenomenal influence: His recommendations can make or break a product launch. Li Jiaqi is the only male key opinion leader (KOL) for cosmetics and the best salesperson for beauty products in China. He once sold 15,000 lipsticks in just five minutes and tried on 380 lipsticks in a seven-hour livestreaming show. He boasts more than 7 million followers on Weibo and close to 40 million on Douyin. Then there’s Li Jiaqi, a 28-year-old influencer who pioneered digital cosmetics retailing and is known as the Lipstick King. Sometimes described as “Groupon on steroids,” it has gamified the shopping process, enabling groups to haggle with merchants, often via WeChat. Pinduoduo, the largest agriculture-focused platform in China, was founded in 2015 and is currently worth $175 billion. China’s livestreaming market has reached $16.3 billion and is now integral to how people shop-which is why Walmart invested in Douyin. Douyin encouraged participation by welcoming content creators, who often featured their favorite products and clothing styles, making the app a marketing tool. There’s Douyin-known in the West as TikTok-which started as an entertainment app for sharing short videos and soon discovered that many users were commenting on popular videos by creating their own versions. So it should be no surprise that Chinese companies and individuals have led the way in developing video retail, social commerce, community retail, retail-as-a-service, and many other new digital channels, including the super app, which provides an all-in-one experience for consumers by accessing various services and offerings. More than 90% of those sales are on mobile devices, compared with less than 50% in the United States.
In China online sales have grown about 25% in each of the past seven years and reached about $1.9 trillion in 2020, when they amounted to some 25% to 50% of total retail (compared with 10% to 20% in the United States).
Given that the pandemic has made digital every retailer’s strategic priority, it’s not hard to see why the Economist opened 2021 with a cover story headlined “Why Retailers Everywhere Should Look to China.”
China is both a large and a fast-growing retail market-worth about $5 trillion in 2020-and highly digitized.
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