Editor’s Note
This article explores the bustling Hualin Live Streaming Base in Guangzhou, a key hub in China’s jewelry and jade trade. Known for its vast selection and competitive pricing, it offers a glimpse into the dynamic world of gemstone commerce and modern retail trends.
Guangzhou’s Hualin is known as “China’s No. 1 Jewelry and Jade Street,” gathering over 80% of Guangzhou’s jade merchants and accounting for more than 90% of the city’s total jade trade volume. Hualin Jade Street is about 350 meters long, with several buildings primarily dedicated to jewelry and jade items like agarwood, jadeite, and gems. The visited Building C focuses on jade, with six or seven floors each filled with goods. Jewelry and jade pieces ranging from tens to tens of thousands of RMB are displayed equally at the stalls.
According to stall owners, most of the goods come from Yunnan or Myanmar. After acquiring the raw materials, they hire craftsmen to carve them into various finished products, including bracelets, ornaments, brush pens, and rings—virtually everything one could imagine. The base manager stated that these stall owners were previously scattered across various markets before relevant authorities gathered them to form this wholesale market. Due to the presence of a management body and supporting professional inspection agencies, “the goods here only differ in quality, but there are absolutely no counterfeits.”
If a tourist is interested in a piece of jewelry, the inspection agencies here can issue a professional inspection report within 1-2 hours at most. Of course, the primary business here is wholesale. The Douyin Live Streaming Base located within the building mainly serves merchants.
To regulate the live streaming market for jewelry and jade, Douyin is currently collaborating with major jewelry and jade bases nationwide. Only merchants settled in these live streaming bases are allowed to sell on the platform, and each item must pass through the base’s designated inspection agency and courier company before shipment.
Additionally, there are a few notable details:
1. A courier sits waiting for pickups every few stalls, maximizing efficiency.
2. Many storefronts display notices recruiting hosts or welcoming business discussions, and promotional materials about live streaming are随处可见.
3. Compared to jewelry and jade in shopping malls, the goods here are 20% to 33% cheaper and guaranteed authentic.
The industry often emphasizes product selection as crucial to a live stream’s success, but without a supply of goods, how can one select? Selling a few items casually can be handled by any shop, but to scale up and maintain advantages in price and quality, one must rely on supply chain bases like this and the thousands of factories behind them.
Live streaming is an art of speed. Within one minute, thousands of users flood into a live stream room to place orders, but that’s just the beginning. Subsequently, the merchant’s systems, customer service, factories, and logistics must operate at high speed to deliver goods to users as quickly as possible. “For every minute delayed, there’s a chance a user might request a return.”
Achieving such speed requires maximizing efficiency. Supply chain bases like No.5 Apparel Town focus on resource integration and efficiency enhancement. The most striking impression upon entering No.5 Apparel Town is its comprehensiveness. Located in Guangzhou’s Shahe wholesale market, it covers over 65,000 square meters, fully equipped with stalls, product selection centers, photography studios, and fashion show runways. The town serves as a resource hub, integrating the apparel supply chain to improve efficiency and secure more profit margin.
For instance, the town can accommodate 1,200 stalls. Most currently operating stalls adopt a front-store, back-warehouse model. Once a clothing item becomes popular, the factory behind can immediately produce and ship it, demonstrating high efficiency.
The town offers shared live streaming rooms, shared design teams, and shared photography studios to reduce operational costs for some merchants. On the day of the visit, models were already shooting clothing photos in the newly renovated photography studio on the top floor. The town’s newly opened self-operated product selection center is striving to enrich merchants’ product libraries, further enhancing live streaming sales efficiency.
Additionally, according to the manager, the town has built a fashion show runway for hosting influencer fan meetings and clothing launches. The town is not limited to being a goods integration and transfer station but aims for broader development space.
The front end of live streaming e-commerce can address traffic issues through hosts and platform投放, but what ultimately reaches users are the goods. Who can launch more new products, who can produce goods faster, and who can deliver goods to users quicker—these invisible competitions determine who can more efficiently convert the traffic brought by hosts and platforms.
As early as 2019, Qianxun, where Wei Ya is based, began planning a “super supply chain” system. Meione, behind Li Jiaqi, also formed a QC (Quality Control) team, all members being postgraduates. In August this year, Xinba’s Xinxuan Guangzhou Live Streaming Base officially launched. Users may not often feel these efforts, but it is precisely these behind-the-scenes forces that determine the success or failure of live streaming.
Linearly, the entire live streaming e-commerce can be divided into three segments: user end, traffic end, and supply chain end.
On the user end, for shopping-focused followers, loyalty is irrelevant; good products at low prices are everything. For entertainment-focused followers, shopping is another form of tipping.
In the latter half of live streaming, as user novelty fades, it’s time for users to critically assess the e-commerce capabilities and content production capacity of live streams.
On the traffic end, top hosts capture the most attention, while mid-tier hosts heavily rely on platform traffic allocation and must depend on commercial投放.
In the latter half, as traffic stabilizes, the test lies in merchants’ and hosts’ ability to engage emotions, user conversion rates, and mastery of platform rules.
On the supply chain end, it’s a comprehensive test of product quality, efficiency, and e-commerce capabilities. Through visits, it was found that while the supply chain end has established an overall framework, there is still significant room for improvement in overall coordination and building live-streaming-exclusive supply chains.
In the latter half, live streaming enters deep waters. As maneuvering space on the user and traffic ends shrinks, competition in the supply chain becomes a crucial part of determining live streaming e-commerce success.
Currently, although many places nationwide have established supply chain bases, they appear particularly “cumbersome” due to involving logistics, customer service, production, design, and other links. Consequently, many supply chain bases seem somewhat rushed and not perfectly refined.
For example, at No.5 Apparel Town, the self-operated product selection center highlighted by the manager had only been open for 10 days, and the shared photography studio was still under renovation. At Hualin Live Streaming Base, merchant recruitment for Douyin sales only officially started in the first half of this year.
The supply chain is a vital link determining whether live streaming can sustain long-term success, and it particularly requires substantial hard work.
