The "renewal" of a small Chinese town by e-commerce and live streaming

DONGGUAN,China,Dec. 14,2020 -- Recently,the opening ceremony of the 7th Humen International E-commerce Festival was held at the Humen Convention and Exhibition Center in Dongguan city of Guangdong province. It is an industrial exchange and display platform for Humen,a Chinese town specialized in women clothing industry,to accelerate the digitalization of traditional industries,improve the efficiency of the supply chain and to optimize the image of the local brands and products.

E-commerce development and live streaming help break through the bottleneck of traditional industrial,which has happened in Dongguan Humen town in China.

"This year's epidemic only has little impact on the industry. As early as 2017,some clothing shops in Humen have started selling products through livestreaming platforms,a great way to tap the consuming potential of China's third- and fourth-tier cities. That's why the local industry can resist the risks brought by the epidemic and witness a growth in sales volume," said Wang Wei,chairman of Humen E-commerce Industrial Park. While China fosters a new development paradigm with domestic circulation as the mainstay and domestic and international circulations reinforcing each other,Humen of Dongguan is once again at the forefront of reform.

Yang Tao,executive director of the Shanghai United E-commerce Research Institute,believes that the epidemic has changed consumers' shopping habits and the demand for online shopping has been increasing significantly. The data and technology of e-commerce platforms play a key role in ensuring the unimpeded flow between supply and demand sides,production and consumption,which helps China's domestic circulation.

"In the past,manufacturers relied on business experience to judge the styles and production quantities of clothing products. Now,they can test and pre-sell on e-commerce platforms,and based on pre-sale data,analyze whether the styles are easy to sell and determine the quantity of production,reducing the stocking risks," said Li Dingru,president of the Humen E-commerce Association.

With this change,the supply-side structure of Humen's apparel industry has been improving to meet the consumer demands of higher quality. Take Humen E-commerce Industrial Park as an example,it provides many producer services,including training for livestreaming hosts,e-commerce marketing,online shops operation and art design to suit for the demand of transformation and upgrading of companies.

Wang Yaoming,mayor of Humen town,said that the scale and quality of Humen's e-commerce industry have continued to improve,with optimized structure benefits and accelerated innovative development. This year,the industry has been further developing,helping stimulate consumption,attract investment,and promote employment.

In 2019,Humen,with a permanent population of about 600,000,has more than 10,000 enterprises and self-employed individual businesses engaged in e-commerce and over 150,000 relevant employees,of which 90% are engaged in the apparel industry.The online sales reached to nearly 47.8 billion yuan through third-party platforms,and about 380 million parcels were delivered through express delivery,the amounts of which have been seeing an annual growth rate of 10%.

The rapid development of the new business model fosters new growth areas. However,it also brings new problems such as low access threshold and uneven quality of employees. The local industrial parks have also faced problems like buyer complaints,non standard product tags,and livestreaming in disorder.

In order to regulate deviant behavior and prevent follow-up problems,the Technical Committee for Standardization of Guangdong E-commerce Industrial Parks has been officially established in Humen in 2019. Since then,it has successively participated in the formulation of four national standards and two industrial standards,to promote the healthy and sustainable development of the industry.

According to Li Dingru,the key in standardization also lies in the close integration of employees and the industry. The local shops in Humen cultivate their own livestreaming hosts who understand the products and the brands better and are able to truly impress consumers with their products,increasing the credibility of shops while avoiding the negative effects of false publicity brought by KOL hosts or celebrity hosts.

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