The sight of a 50-year-old man peddling cosmetics on a livestream show might strike many as unusual, but that didn’t stop 60,000 people from watching him and buying over 400,000 yuan ($57,400) of his products.

(Photo/Chinanews.com)

Sun Chunlai, owner of a chain of 337 beauty stores, had vowed never to livestream, but is now doing just that everyday as the novel coronavirus rages across China. Sun’s skincare brand used to account for 75 percent of his stores’ total turnover, but that plummeted to 5 percent during the Chinese New Year holiday, when COVID-19 cases started surging.

In a desperate bid to save his enterprise, Sun mobilized all of his 2,000 employees to work online, and decided to shift the company’s main focus to the internet.

Livestream e-commerce professionals were then brought in to help with the transformation, which involved teaching Sun and his employees how to apply makeup and make sales pitches.

Now, over 90 percent of his revenue comes from online platforms, and his sales volume is 145 percent higher than that from a year ago. Around 3,000 consumers are signing up on a daily basis.

“I thought my cashflow was going to dry up in two or three months, but now, with this performance, we are totally OK,” Sun said.

Cosmetics companies are not the only sector to move their business onto livestream platforms; real estate agents, auto salespeople and even chefs are also trying to cash in.

With the sales offices of real estate developers in over 60 Chinese cities shut down due to the epidemic, many of them are now livestreaming tours of houses and apartments.

According to Tang Lin, a real estate agent from Liuzhou, south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, his livestreaming show was watched by 60,000 people at one point, and over 20 of them contacted him through WeChat. Normally, he can only show prototype rooms to two of his customers each day, but livestreaming has greatly increased his work efficiency.

Du Junhui, head of the e-commerce department of Meizhou Dongpo, a catering business headquartered in Beijing, explained that after the enterprise started livestreaming its cooking. process, its sales volumes on e-commerce platform Tmall skyrocketed 14-fold from a year ago on Feb. 17.

According to incomplete statistics, 23 auto brands including BMW and Audi have all started livestreaming to sell their automobiles, putting on at least 100 auto livestreaming shows per day.