Farfetch and Neiman Marcus join forces to update luxury retail for the ecommerce age: The fashion platform will invest up to $200 million in the retailer, with the latter using Farfetch’s ecommerce tools to power digital channels.

US consumers can’t get enough of luxury retail: While Walmart and Target struggle, LVMH and Burberry benefit as affluent customers ramp up their spending.

The way consumers in China are shopping for luxury goods is changing amid the pandemic, with more purchases happening locally because of shelter-in-place protocols and travel restrictions.

For years, luxury brands around the world have been slow to adopt digital. But the pandemic has sped up the process, forcing many to pivot and innovate during a time when a large number of transactions are happening digitally.

The top 15 livestream shopping categories in China

Sky covers retail and ecommerce with a focus on digital transformation in the fashion, beauty, and luxury industries. Prior to joining Insider Intelligence, she spent more than a decade as a business journalist, editor, and content director covering trends in the Chinese market.

One of the platforms where consumers can do this is Chinese-launched ShopShops, which recently entered the US. We spoke with Liyia Wu, founder and CEO, about why livestream shopping will take off in the US, challenges brands face when entering livestreaming, and the impacts of livestream shopping on ecommerce brands. Insider Intelligence: How is livestreaming in the US different from China?

We estimate that in China—where many shoppers want products from leading international brands, including luxury labels—the number of cross-border ecommerce buyers rose by almost 25% in 2020, as consumers took advantage of both direct sales from brand websites and marketplaces that have opened the vast Chinese market to non-Chinese products.

Once relegated to the children’s market, virtual characters are entering the mainstream in China. Fictional as these digitally rendered avatars may be, they hold real jobs, from pop star to influencer, to even news anchor. And they’re becoming increasingly interactive and humanlike, thanks to improvements in technologies such as AI, motion capture, and virtual reality (VR). Recent advancements in augmented reality (AR), in particular, have enabled virtual avatars to step out of social media and make live appearances alongside flesh-and-blood celebrities.

The vision of augmented reality (AR) headsets replacing smartphones could become a reality sooner than expected in China. Advances in hardware and new AR commerce use cases are paving the way.

Luxury brands soon followed suit—a move hastened by the near-total absence of tourists from China, who make a huge contribution to France’s luxury brands in normal times. Our revised estimates assume a minimal impact on ad spend in France in Q1, since the steep escalation in infections and lockdown only came in mid-March.

We forecast 93.4% of internet users in China will watch digital video this year, so the population is primed for sub OTT services. By contrast, only 37.0% of internet users in India will be sub OTT users this year, and the figure will be a scant 12.5% in Indonesia. For many in these populations, sub OTT usage still represents an unaffordable luxury.

This year, apparel brand Dickies worked with Alibaba to launch a new line of baseball jackets in China just ahead of Singles’ Day, while Philips debuted a water flosser designed specifically for the Chinese market. There is a need to focus on accessibility.

Alibaba also launched a revamped Tmall Luxury Pavilion featuring AR try-ons and 3D showrooms. The power of livestreaming drove conversions. Top influencers Austin (Jiaqi) Li and Viya drove a combined RMB 20 billion ($2.90 billion) worth of sales during livestream marathons lasting a dozen hours or so each, with Li’s session alone drawing 250 million viewers.

2020 was a tumultuous year to say the least, but as the adage goes, in crisis there is opportunity. This idea is literally embedded in the Chinese word for “crisis” (危机): Its second character means opportunity. China’s populace appeared to have embodied that spirit. In a challenging year, entrepreneurs and regulators alike worked together to steady the ship and found ways to restore some normalcy through resilience, digital innovations, and timely policies.

Among the respondents most willing to consider buying, selling, or using NFTs were those in Indonesia (65%), Mexico (53%), India (52%), and China (45%). Consumers in the US and Great Britain were among the least interested, at 12% and 9%, respectively.

“Women hold up half the sky,” former Chinese leader Mao Zedong famously said. More than fifty years on, women in China are doing so online, driving digital trends and fast becoming a cohort that marketers ignore at their peril.

Travel and luxury goods are facing especially difficult times. As consumer lockdowns began in March, airlines, hotels, tour operators and vehicle rental firms were among the first to withdraw TV advertising. Luxury brands soon followed, spurred in large part by the sudden cut-off of tourism from China and other Asia-Pacific countries.