Recently, the opening ceremony of the 7th Humen International E-commerce 
Festival was held at the Humen Convention and Exhibition Center in Dongguan 
city of Guangdong province. It is an industrial exchange and display platform 
for Humen, a Chinese town specialized in women clothing industry, to accelerate 
the digitalization of traditional industries, improve the efficiency of the 
supply chain and to optimize the image of the local brands and products.

E-commerce development and live streaming help break through the bottleneck of 
traditional industrial, which has happened in Dongguan Humen town in China.

"This year's epidemic only has little impact on the industry. As early as 2017, 
some clothing shops in Humen have started selling products through 
livestreaming platforms, a great way to tap the consuming potential of China's 
third- and fourth-tier cities. That's why the local industry can resist the 
risks brought by the epidemic and witness a growth in sales volume," said Wang 
Wei, chairman of Humen E-commerce Industrial Park. While China fosters a new 
development paradigm with domestic circulation as the mainstay and domestic and 
international circulations reinforcing each other, Humen of Dongguan is once 
again at the forefront of reform.

Yang Tao, executive director of the Shanghai United E-commerce Research 
Institute, believes that the epidemic has changed consumers' shopping habits 
and the demand for online shopping has been increasing significantly. The data 
and technology of e-commerce platforms play a key role in ensuring the 
unimpeded flow between supply and demand sides, production and consumption, 
which helps China's domestic circulation.

"In the past, manufacturers relied on business experience to judge the styles 
and production quantities of clothing products. Now, they can test and pre-sell 
on e-commerce platforms, and based on pre-sale data, analyze whether the styles 
are easy to sell and determine the quantity of production, reducing the 
stocking risks," said Li Dingru, president of the Humen E-commerce Association.

With this change, the supply-side structure of Humen's apparel industry has 
been improving to meet the consumer demands of higher quality. Take Humen 
E-commerce Industrial Park as an example,it provides many producer services, 
including training for livestreaming hosts, e-commerce marketing, online shops 
operation and art design to suit for the demand of transformation and upgrading 
of companies.

Wang Yaoming, mayor of Humen town, said that the scale and quality of Humen's 
e-commerce industry have continued to improve, with optimized structure 
benefits and accelerated innovative development. This year, the industry has 
been further developing, helping stimulate consumption, attract investment, and 
promote employment.

In 2019, Humen, with a permanent population of about 600,000, has more than 
10,000 enterprises and self-employed individual businesses engaged in 
e-commerce and over 150,000 relevant employees, of which 90% are engaged in the 
apparel industry.The online sales reached to nearly 47.8 billion yuan through 
third-party platforms, and about 380 million parcels were delivered through 
express delivery, the amounts of which have been seeing an annual growth rate 
of 10%.

The rapid development of the new business model fosters new growth areas. 
However, it also brings new problems such as low access threshold and uneven 
quality of employees. The local industrial parks have also faced problems like 
buyer complaints, non standard product tags, and livestreaming in disorder.

In order to regulate deviant behavior and prevent follow-up problems, the 
Technical Committee for Standardization of Guangdong E-commerce Industrial 
Parks has been officially established in Humen in 2019. Since then, it has 
successively participated in the formulation of four national standards and two 
industrial standards, to promote the healthy and sustainable development of the 
industry.

According to Li Dingru, the key in standardization also lies in the close 
integration of employees and the industry. The local shops in Humen cultivate 
their own livestreaming hosts who understand the products and the brands better 
and are able to truly impress consumers with their products, increasing the 
credibility of shops while avoiding the negative effects of false publicity 
brought by KOL hosts or celebrity hosts.

Source: The 7th Humen International E-commerce Festival