Since the rapid development of information technology, especially the Internet, the digital community has been growing. A new type of digital consumer, characterized by all-digital life consumption and online and offline integration, is rapidly emerging. As a result, practitioners are increasingly focusing on strategies that use online celebrities to run their social commerce businesses. For example, 60% of sample brands in the survey focused on influencers’ strategies to increase their social commerce investments (Wang, Panpan, and Qian Huang，2022).

Since the new crown epidemic swept the world in 2020 and the policy of home isolation was implemented, live shopping gradually formed a new ‘economic growth portal’ in China. The live broadcast is a three-dimensional media model; he can interact directly with consumers online close to the offline real-scene interaction. Social influencers on different platforms such as TikTok, Taobao, Jingdong, etc., sign contracts with companies about which specific products to market for live shopping. Jingdong Company cooperated with the short video platform Racer to hold the 618 shopping festival. On June 16, Racer generated over 1.4 billion yuan in sales, while Jingdong said they conducted over 300,000 live streams throughout the festival. (Soon Chen Kang, Taimoor Tariq, and Xiuxi Zhu,2020) With the rise of live shopping, the Chinese market has accelerated the conversion of brick-and-mortar businesses to digital and has driven the economy even more.

Figure 1 shows a screenshot of a macro-influencer with 1 million followers live-streaming a product on TikTok.

Nearly 80% of marketers believe digital influencers are potent factors contributing to consumer engagement and purchase (Wang, Panpan, and Qian Huang，2022). The digital community intertwines a group of people with common interests, so digital consumers and influencers are complementary to drive the economy during an epidemic.

The following vedio provides more information about live shopping on social media.