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Spotted: Alibaba’s powerhouse online shopping platform, Taobao, has plans to use live-streaming to help rural farmers. In 2018, Taobao drew more than 400 million viewers to watch live streams featuring farmers and local government officials discussing challenges, delivering training on marketing techniques and helping to promote goods. Now, Taobao is expanding the programme.

Taobao has announced plans to work with 1,000 farmers in low-income areas, in 100 counties, helping them to generate more than RMB 10,000 (€1289) each month in income.  As part of the programme, Taobao will also collaborate with local governments and invite Chinese pop stars and celebrities to promote local interests. 

The Taobao live-streaming channel will reserve a daily two-hour slot for the videos. It also has plans to work with media outlets such as China Central Television and Zhejiang TV, to curate professionally produced live-streaming content about fresh produce, as well as the farms themselves. The goal is to enable farmers to manage their own live-stream e-commerce channels and boost business in poor areas.

In a press release, Taobao’s director of e-commerce content, Chen Lei, explained the thinking behind the new programme as enabling poverty relief, “by leveraging e-commerce and live-streaming via creative digital technologies.” The company says that it is committed to driving RMB 3 billion (€380 million) in sales for the agricultural sector in 2019.

Livestreaming is just one of the retail innovations we have seen take off in recent years. At Springwise, we have also followed developments such as the live stream chat and social online shopping.