Yuan Xiaomei promotes her honey products through livestreaming in Nayong County, southwest China's Guizhou Province, April 28, 2021.(Photo: Xinhua)

With Christmas and the traditional consumption season in the West around the corner, livestream shopping, fueled by a surge in at-home shopping during the COVID-19 pandemic, is quickly gaining popularity among Western consumers - and a new sales channel and growth point for Chinese vendors.

TikTok is expected to launch its live shopping function in the US during the Christmas holiday, following launches in the UK and Indonesia earlier this year, several Chinese cross-border livestreaming agencies told the Global Times. 

While the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the global economy, it has also accelerated the digitalization of trade. The value of the global cross-border e-commerce industry has increased by 20 percent in 2020, according to data from the UN Conference on Trade and Development.

Compared with the more mature sector in China, livestream shopping is still in its infancy in the West but is gaining pace.

"On Black Friday, we did livestreaming on Amazon from 8 am to 12 am midnight with no break. The schedule for livestreaming in December is also full, with six to eight sessions a day," Feng Xuefeng, a manager at SakTok, a cross-border livestreaming agency based in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong Province, told the Global Times on Thursday.

Feng said sales through livestreaming on Amazon.us have increased 10-fold since it started the business about a year ago. "Last year, our sales stood at hundreds of dollars for each livestreaming session. Now, it's thousands of dollars," he said.

"The most frequent interaction we have with foreign viewers concerns price," Feng said, with livestreaming prices about 15-30 percent cheaper than on the website. The most popular items during livestreaming sales sessions are 3C products and clothes.

Liu Chang, founder of MADEINRED INC, an e-commerce livestreaming company that helps Chinese brands sell overseas through TikTok, said that cross-border sales are expanding quickly on the new track, and many Chinese brands have invested a lot to promote their brands.

"My clients include domestic phonemakers Xiaomi and Lenovo. Some brands would offer prices as low as 1.99 pounds ($2.62) for a headset to seize the market," Liu said.

Since the company started livestreaming on TikTok in the UK market in July, sales have risen five-fold every month.

"We are optimistic about the growth of this track. The whole TikTok livestreaming sector in the US is still in the internal testing stage. It is estimated that the opening of the US market will unleash dozens of times more consumption power than the British market," Liu said, saying TikTok's livestreaming selling could be fully rolled out in US around Christmas or the first quarter next year.

The development prospects of live broadcasting in the European and US markets are gaining pace, with more people beginning to accept the new form of shopping, industry insiders said.

"People have slowly accepted the format of livestreaming shopping, though it may still take one or two years for foreign consumers to get used to it as the Chinese people have," Feng said.

During the Double 11 shopping festival, the cumulative livestreaming sales of Chinese star Li Jiaqi reached 11.5 billion yuan ($1.8 billion), according to data released by China's e-commerce platform Taobao.

Some leading livestreaming channels plan to develop their own influential live-streamers like Li to attract foreign customers. According to Liu, the company has found four foreign livestreamers it aims to make into foreign versions of Li. 

Anna, a successful livestreamer at the company who mainly sells to English-speaking shoppers, has gained 910,000 fans within four months.

Companies seeking livestreamers often prefer English teachers with good communication skills who can also communicate in Chinese, Liu said.

Competition among livestreaming agencies is fierce.

"In China, there are about 100 certified TikTok Shop Partner (TSP) live broadcasting companies. We have just covered our costs, which is the current situation of most TikTok TSPs," Liu said.

In 2020, China's cross-border e-commerce value stood at 1.69 trillion yuan, up 31.1 percent over the previous year, with the scale of cross-border e-commerce increasing nearly 10 times in the past five years, official data showed.