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E-commerce, live-streaming help drive recovery in China’s retail scene amid coronavirus slump
- Online sales of physical goods surged 36.3 per cent year-on-year during the Labour Day holiday in China
- Total retail sales of consumer goods fell by 20.5 per cent year-on-year nominally in the first two months of the year
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Online sales of physical goods surged 36.3 per cent year-on-year during the Labour Day holiday in China, helping to drive the recovery of the country’s retail scene which has been suffering from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, China’s Ministry of Commerce said at a briefing on Friday.
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“The epidemic has given rise to increasing interest in new types of consumption such as online grocery shopping, online education and telemedicine,” said vice-minister for commerce Wang Bingnan at the briefing.
Live-streaming, in particular, has become a “hot trend” in e-commerce, according to Wang. The number of live-streamed online sales campaigns doubled during the five-day national holiday that ended on Tuesday, with some events recording sales of as much as 140 million yuan (US$19.8 million), Wang said.
He added that the volume of sales from live-streams over the holiday this year was 4.7 times of that from the same period last year.
The online shopping boom comes amid Beijing’s efforts to reverse dampened consumer sentiment and revive the world’s second largest economy, which showed its first contraction in nearly three decades in the first quarter of this year.
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Offline retailers have been hit particularly hard by the outbreak, with shopping malls and stores closed and most consumers staying home after coronavirus lockdowns were imposed across the country from late January.
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