The Live Streaming Shopping : A New Industrial Ecology in China

Over the past decade, shopping online has become increasingly mainstream with the introduction of accessible e-commerce websites and mobile applications. In the meantime, the proliferation of social media and live streaming platforms has supported internet celebrities or key opinion leaders (KOLs) directing their followers to quality products. These two trends are intertwined to produce a new industrial ecology: the live streaming shopping. In this paper, we show that live streaming shopping integrates pleasant social interaction, new product discovery, exceptional promotions, professional reviews, and entertainment, which creates an immense influence on consumer shopping behavior. By investigating the fundamental changes that LSS keeps bringing to the industry's supply chain, we identified some critical issues of LSS's future. It sheds some light on a more optimized supply LSS ecology in the near future.