Haixia is selling goods in the live broadcast. Photo courtesy of the interviewee.
Yin Haiyue. Early in the morning of the Chinese New Year's Eve in 2023, Haixia from Dongzhanggu Village, Lianzhuang Town, Qinghe County, Xingtai, Hebei Province, got up and began to prepare New Year's goods to worship "Grandpa Tian" and ancestors. This time, she also offered the computer at home, and she put melon seeds, sugar, and incense in front of the computer, hoping that the business would be more prosperous in the coming year.
Haixia's business is inseparable from the net. In 2023, she will sell tens of thousands of pieces through live broadcasts and opening**. A year is like a day. Haixia lamented that she had hardly slept a full nap last year, and people kept asking questions on the Internet, "I muttered a string of (messages) when I left the stool".
During her lunch break, as soon as she heard the "dongdong" sound of her mobile phone, she quickly picked up her mobile phone to reply to customers' questions, "be on call anytime, anywhere".
She works alone as an anchor, customer service, and packer. Every morning when I wake up, I start to close the order and place an order. At 3 o'clock in the afternoon, she broadcast live for more than two hours, and then packed the clothes of the day and waited for the courier to come to the door.
Although it was hard, Haixia felt satisfied. In the past few years, she has relied on e-commerce to sell goods, and she has earned enough money for her family's expenses and enough money to buy a house in the county. "I did the best job in the first two years", Haixia recalled, at that time, there were often "explosive orders", and the anchors went to the store to grab the goods, "grab a few in one hand, count a few, and fight in the end".
According to official data, Qinghe County, which has a population of more than 400,000, currently has more than 10,000 anchors. "At the beginning, I earned 10,000 yuan a month, which was similar to going to work, and then I was very content to earn 30,000 yuan a month. Later, you find out that it is normal to earn 180,000 yuan a month. A well-done anchor said.
In the past, people here liked to say that this was the "hometown of Wu Song, the hero of the tiger fight". Now, the official slogan is "E-commerce Capital, Internet Celebrity New Town".
As the country's largest cashmere and cashmere products distribution center, Qinghe has natural advantages in developing live broadcasting. In the local cashmere products market of nearly 1,000 acres, there are more than 600 suppliers lined up on the street, and the windows display model pictures and main clothing. Whether it's cashmere, wool products, or chemical fiber clothes, you can find them here.
Haixia sells mostly clothes for dozens of yuan. In addition to going to Shijiazhuang to buy goods, she also often "picks up" goods in the local market.
She doesn't know how Qinghe's live broadcast became popular, but she remembers that before the live broadcast appeared, many people in Qinghe made jokes on the Internet, and after there were more fans, they sold clothes on several ***. Haixia also bought it, "It was really hot at that time, and it took a long time to receive the transfer." Haixia's relatives accumulated hundreds of thousands of fans by filming jokes, and later sold clothes live and made a lot of money.
In the second half of 2019, relatives suggested that Haixia start a live broadcast to sell clothes. At that time, no one in Haixia's village did a live broadcast, and she was embarrassed to broadcast it at first, but as soon as she turned on the camera, "it was turned off in the blink of an eye". An acquaintance entered the live broadcast room, but she didn't dare to speak, so she "blocked" the acquaintance, and only lifted the "block" after the broadcast was familiar.
She still remembers the scene of the first "explosion order". That day, she put her phone on a small bench and sat across from her looking at it. Afraid of being cold, she chatted with a friend "Lianmai", after the friend went offline, someone began to enter the live broadcast room, she chatted with people in dialect, said no two sentences, and the live broadcast room kept entering people.
She had a 29 in her shopping cart9 yuan straight-leg pants, people asked her how many pounds she wore them, let her wear them to try, she went to the camera to change into **, and introduced the elasticity of the pants in stiff Mandarin. That afternoon, Haixia sowed for more than two hours, sold forty or fifty orders, and earned hundreds of yuan.
This makes Haixia feel that the live broadcast is much easier than "combing the velvet". In the 90s of the 20th century, Qinghe people purchased raw materials from other places and carded out cashmere through carding machines, forming more than 100 cashmere carding professional villages.
Haixia's father supported the family by carding cashmere. After Haixia got married, she installed 3 carding machines at home, and the machines "rumbled" for a year, which could earn enough for the tuition of her two sons and the expenses of the family, but "there was no leisure time from morning to night". Every day, when she wakes up, she doesn't have time to wash her face, so she turns on the carding machine first and receives a bag of cashmere every 20 minutes. At the end of the day, even with a mask on, there is dust in your nose. What's even more difficult is the summer, there is no air conditioning in the room, and people walk around "sweating profusely".
Later, in 2008, ** rose, and many people learned to open ** stores and made a fortune by selling yarn and ready-to-wear online. Haixia also wants to sell yarn, but there is no purchase channel. She learned from others to sell cashmere, woolen sweaters, and underwear online, but it was always a "small fight", and the sales were only enough to earn pocket money.
Two years before the rise of live broadcasting, Haixia was at a low point in her life. Her family was hospitalized, her savings were spent, and the gold jewelry she kept at home was stolen. "It was a hard time. At this, she couldn't help but cry.
Later, people in the same village said that she was bold in live broadcasting, she said, "It's not bold, I can't make much money at work, and we don't steal or rob." ”
She remembers that at the beginning, as long as the broadcast started, someone would enter the live broadcast room. In order to sell more, she used 5 mobile phones to broadcast live on one platform at the same time, and someone asked her to try on clothes, so she tried it on the account with many fans first.
She didn't know how to live broadcast skills, so she shouted "Don't miss it when you pass by", and some fans said that she was like "selling rat medicine". It didn't take long for her voice to be speechless. She watched how other live broadcast rooms were broadcast, learned to introduce clothing fabrics, softness, and matching methods, and regarded the live broadcast as "chatting with people".
There are peers who have very sales experience, "they don't look handsome and boast about their heads, their image is not good and they talk about their temperament, so they want to make consumers feel that they have taken advantage of it", and selling goods in the live broadcast room is the same reason, "to give a thing value." ”
At the beginning, she broadcast every afternoon, and when she saw that there was always traffic, she broadcast it when she was free, and broadcast it for two hours in the morning, noon, and evening. In order to show her height, she is 1.6 meters tall and often looks down at the camera, and after a long time, her cervical spine becomes more and more painful, "like a pinprick".
Once, she started broadcasting in the afternoon and broadcast for 7 hours in a row, and she didn't eat dinner. At the end of the live broadcast, she had a headache and couldn't get out of bed, and she vomited on the ground when she went to the hospital, and she was ** for several days. "Don't mention how stupid you are. "Speaking of live broadcast with illness, she was a little embarrassed, and bluntly said that when the traffic kept pouring in, it was difficult for people to stop," the live broadcast room suddenly asked, how many catties of this is worn, what kind of pattern is that, staring at the screen, she can't reply at all, and just reply to a person (message) is suddenly gone. ”
In order to find a good style, she and her relatives organized a group to go to Shijiazhuang City, the provincial capital, to buy goods, pick a day in the clothing market, take the sample clothes back for a trial broadcast, and someone placed an order to let the seller ship it, and then send it away from Qinghe. Later, when she got acquainted with the boss, Haixia selected the money directly from the Internet, and sometimes asked the boss to ship it directly.
Some people's fashion vane is the Spring Festival Gala, from the Spring Festival Gala stage scenery and actors' costume colors in the past two years, it was found that the popular "Chinese style" has developed several Chinese-style cashmere sweaters. Some people were afraid that the same style would come out of the market, so they went to Hangzhou to specially adjust a yarn color and named it "Forbidden City Red", and "the whole Qinghe could not find a second factory that could make this color".
In those years, as soon as the cashmere products market in Qinghe entered the autumn, it was often blocked. The supplier was busy packing in the house, and the printer spat out strings of courier bills, "squeaking and dinging" non-stop. A staff member at a local courier company said that during peak hours, more than a dozen large trucks lined up in front of the courier company, waiting for packages to enter the warehouse.
Haixia considers herself lucky to be able to "work at home without having to deal with crowds."
However, as more and more people pour into the live broadcast, Haixia obviously feels that from 2022 onwards, the traffic will not be as good as before, and when the situation is good, more than a dozen pieces will be sold a day, and sometimes it will be broadcast for several hours, and the number of people will only be a few people. After the platform was standardized, she could only use one mobile phone to broadcast live.
Streamers are starting to work on the hardware. The owner of a local shop selling camera equipment said that in the past, everyone had low requirements for lighting, "200 yuan top", and now they often have a 1,000 yuan fill light. A photographer can receive orders from big anchors almost every day to install cameras of 20,000 yuan or 30,000 yuan.
Haixia's live broadcast room is also upgrading little by little, she hung the word "Fu" on the original bare wall, bought green plants and put them on the shelves, and spent more than 300 yuan to install a "non-reflective" curtain, and tried to find an operation to push the stream.
What's more important is that there are good styles. Haixia said that when encountering a good style, it can be sold for two more days, but the big anchor grabs a popular model and broadcasts it live, leaving less and less market space for the small anchor. In the second half of last year, Haixia shifted her energy to operating a store on a platform, thinking about how to push traffic to the store.
In recent years, Qinghe has been circulating various stories about wealth. Some people accurately followed the wind and ate the dividends of ** and live broadcast one after another. Some people get rich overnight in a trend, and fall off the "altar" because of gambling and investment failures, and some people have been eager to get a piece of the times, but they can't grasp the password of traffic.
As an ordinary rural woman, Haixia could not grasp the direction of the tide, but she struggled to grasp the existing flow with her own hands. She didn't buy much for herself, and she didn't buy anything at home, and with the money she earned, she planned to save up to buy a house for her two sons.
God is fair, let me earn some money. Recalling the experience of the past few years, Haixia feels that "it is the same as storytelling and singing". Nowadays, Haixia walks on the road, often ushering in the envy of the people in the village, and some people want to learn live broadcast from her. She said: "A rural woman, who does not invest in the capital, is very grateful that people have asked us to sell it." ”
*: China Youth Daily.