Pearl sellers find treasure in livestreams

Zhejiang merchants' innovative online promotional skills serve as example at home, abroad

China's first group of licensed pearl-selling livestreamers received vocational skill certificates in March from the National Gemstone Testing Center. The 54 licensees are from Zhuji, Zhejiang province.

Pearls that come from freshwater mussels are more affordable than saltwater pearls. They also come in a wider variety of colors and are considered longer lasting.

The township of Shanxiahu in Zhuji, known as the pearl capital of China, is the nation's largest freshwater pearl processing and trading center. It accounts for some 80 percent of China's annual freshwater pearl yields, and in 2022, its pearl transactions exceeded 40 billion yuan ($5.8 billion).

"Zhuji's pearl industry is an important barometer of the freshwater market both domestically and globally. Other Chinese freshwater pearl businesses can learn from its practices in industrial transformation and upgrading," said Ye Zhibin, president of the Gems & Jewelry Trade Association of China, at the 2022 World Pearl Congress in Zhuji.

In recent years, Shanxiahu residents have ditched traditional sales models for digital selling.

"The traders used to buy pearls from farmers on credit, sell them to clients, and then pay their bills. If anything went wrong, farmers couldn't come up with the money," said He Lixin, Party secretary of the village of Xinchangle, often called "pearl village".

Change came with livestreaming platforms.

He remembers watching villagers sell pearls via livestreaming for the first time in 2017. "Welcome to my livestreaming room," a villager said excitedly in front of a mobile phone, with a mussel in one hand and a tool in the other.

Only a few months after the launch of Taobao Live, Alibaba's livestreaming platform, the village's farmers had figured out a new way to sell pearls in the form of "blind boxes" — essentially a game of chance. Customers would spend 30 yuan on a mussel and then farmers would open it as they were livestreaming. Some customers may get lucky and receive a high-quality pearl while others would only get a blemished one.

Since then, the Party secretary has seen the innovative selling method become popular. "In this way, farmers also attracted a group of regular customers," he said. "Once a customer bought 4,000 mussels, and it took a dozen farmers working half a day to open them."

Of more than 800 pearl-raising households in the village, over 300 have been using livestreaming to sell, He said. Some 75 percent of villagers are involved in livestreaming-related jobs. In 2022, two-thirds of the village's total of 6 billion yuan in pearl sales were made through livestreaming.

Over the past six years, many young people have also returned to their homes in Shanxiahu to start pearl businesses.

More than 25,000 residents are involved in the pearl industry and over 3,000 work as livestreamers. Two livestreaming centers of the short-video platform Douyin have been built in the town.

Still, livestreamers have faced challenges as online selling models accelerate the development of the pearl industry.

In 2022, 85 percent of the complaints handled by the Shanxiahu office of Zhuji's market supervision and administration bureau were related to livestreaming.

"A new livestreamer described a necklace as a 'string of saltwater pearls'. But the customer found that it had 11 saltwater pearls and the other 10 were freshwater pearls. The merchant had to pay for the false description," said Tao Xingbin, deputy director of the office.

Tao said that many cases resulted from unclear product descriptions. One livestreamer said a bracelet was made of gold in its entirety, but a short connecting piece was a wire of another metal. The neglected detail would be a cause of customer dissatisfaction.