Amanda Xie was sceptical when Tiffany, the luxury US jeweller, asked the online influencer to promote a $3,500 diamond necklace in a livestream from her Shanghai apartment.
“I don’t have a lot of confidence in selling luxury goods online, there is no discount and you don’t get the in-store experience,” she said. Like many of her peers, Ms Xie, who has 414,000 followers on the popular fashion platform Xiaohongshu, thinks livestreaming is best suited to raising brand awareness.
Yet she and another two “key online influencers” sold 300 of the Tiffany necklaces in the broadcast viewed by more than 5,000 people, most of them wealthy women in small cities.