The new business era of content e-commerce has already arrived.
Over the past few years, content e-commerce has gone through a complete cycle from explosive growth to maturity.
The entire industry is still booming. An increasing number of creators with different expertise and backgrounds have begun to regard e-commerce as a critical path to realize the value of their content.
This was confirmed at the 2026 Douyin E-Commerce Creator Summit held on September 20.
According to officially disclosed data, the total number of Douyin e-commerce creators has exceeded 12 million at present. Over the past year, the platform has added more than 4.56 million new creators with active sales records.
In the past year, over 1 million live streams were running on Douyin E-Commerce every day, more than 85 million pieces of content recommending high-quality products were released daily, bringing nearly 14.9 billion views of e-commerce content.
On Douyin E-Commerce, new demands are discovered and new trends are spotted.
We can easily capture a clear signal: Douyin E-Commerce has always been the core arena for creators to develop their business in the long run. Besides, new methodologies including the trends of content e-commerce and operation iteration were also presented to the public at this summit.
When Long-term Operation Becomes a Core Agenda
To understand the signals released by this summit, we must first see clearly the ongoing changes in the industry.
Since its inception, content e-commerce has moved past the stage driven by traffic dividends. In the early days, creators could get considerable returns as long as they seized the platform’s growth window; nowadays, consumers make more rational decisions, competition dimensions keep increasing, and live-stream e-commerce has entered an era of refined operation. The new problem facing creators is “how to achieve long-term operation”.
This change is taking place on both the demand side and the supply side.
From the demand side, the user base of content e-commerce is still expanding, and the demand structure is also upgrading. Consumers expect more professional recommendations, more authentic sharing and more stable quality. This means that the role of creators is changing from “people who sell goods” to “trustworthy recommenders”. Once trust is established, users are no longer one-time buyers, but a group of people that creators can operate for a long time.
From the supply side, the changes are equally profound. More and more creators are pouring into content e-commerce, driving the upgrading of the supply structure.
In the past, the competition on the supply side focused on whose content could better capture users’ attention; now, creators with content capabilities, professional experience and operation awareness are becoming the mainstream.
The richer the platform ecosystem is, the more creators at different levels can find their own positions — professional product reviews, origin tracing, life sharing, in-depth popular science, content of different styles can all find their corresponding users.
This means that the activity on the supply side is not a zero-sum game, but expands the overall market capacity. Creators no longer just compete for the same group of users, but use different content capabilities to stimulate the consumption demands of different groups of people.
In other words, the growth on both the supply and demand sides does not make the business “easier to do”, but “more worth doing”. The demand side is expanding and upgrading, while the supply side is getting more active and stratified.
What is truly amplified is the value of creators who are willing to operate in the long term — because only long-term operation can accumulate trust; only by accumulating trust can creators turn users into groups that they can serve continuously.
This means that the core demand of creators is shifting from “getting traffic” to “obtaining operation certainty”. Whoever can provide such certainty will become the main stage for creators.
What Makes a Platform Chosen Repeatedly?
A favorable platform environment is a visible soil for growth jointly built by the ecosystem, methodologies, tools and health-oriented guidelines.
First of all, the ecosystem is prosperous and diverse, leaving room for all kinds of creators to grow.
This diversity means that the platform has formed a pyramid structure: there are benchmarks at the top, vibrant new forces at the base, and continuous upward channels for the middle tier.
The richness of content forms is another dimension of the ecosystem’s depth.
Content on Douyin E-Commerce includes not only short videos, but also live streams. Content of different styles has its own living space. Slow-life live streams can become popular, and agricultural-supporting anchors can drive the development of local industries. Such diversity allows creators to avoid imitating a certain successful template, but find their own audiences based on their own characteristics.
The richness of content forms essentially reflects the diversity of user demands. It has become a daily routine for users to discover products through content and shop while watching, and new consumers are continuously pouring into various fields. “We hope that good content can help discover good creators, and good creators can find good business opportunities,” said Peng Yanyun, Head of Content Ecosystem at Douyin E-Commerce.
Peng Yanyun, Head of Content Ecosystem at Douyin E-Commerce
The entry of new users and new consumer groups means that there is still incremental space on the demand side of content e-commerce, and the continuous emergence of new influencers indicates that the supply side remains active. The sustained growth on both the supply and demand sides provides greater operation space and unlimited creativity for Douyin e-commerce creators.
Lin Xuan, Head of Top Creator and Marketing at Douyin E-Commerce, shared a set of data: in the past year, multiple new records were set on Douyin E-Commerce in 2026, the number of e-commerce live streams with over 10,000 concurrent online viewers remained stable at around 960; the new record for the maximum concurrent online viewers in a single e-commerce creator’s live stream exceeded 4 million.
This series of figures not only refreshed existing records, but also reflected that Douyin E-Commerce maintains rapid development and a continuously prosperous ecosystem.
Whether a platform can develop sustainably depends crucially on the health of its ecosystem.
Over the past year, Douyin E-Commerce has cracked down on bad accounts and content involving infringement, counterfeiting, false publicity and other violations, conveying a clear orientation: good content helps good creators stand out, and good creators achieve good business results.
These factors together form the underlying support for Douyin E-Commerce as an operation base. It is not built overnight, but the result of the joint precipitation of time, creators, content and transactions.
For creators, the significance of the ecosystem’s depth lies in: there is soil for growth, upward channels, conversion paths and a steady stream of users.
Thus, creators will make firm choices of the platform.
Build Complete Supporting Support for Creators
The ecosystem is the foundation, but whether creators can achieve real commercial success largely depends on the supporting support provided by the platform.
Douyin E-Commerce’s solution is not simply to give out support resources, but to split the full set of commercial operation capabilities into easy-to-learn, reusable functional modules, and build a complete “Operation Operating System”.
This system consists of three levels: enabling new creators to “follow clear paths”, enabling growing creators to “climb ladders of development”, and enabling all creators who operate earnestly to “have clear guidelines to follow”.
Over the past year, a large number of creators have achieved leapfrog development on Douyin.
Why are there continuous new creators achieving success? Peng Yanyun, Head of Content Ecosystem at Douyin E-Commerce, gave the answer: the platform’s refined operation, all-round support and full-process accompanying assistance.
The content e-commerce industry has an unavoidable pain point: being good at creating content does not mean being proficient in commercial operation. Live stream cold start, account positioning polishing, product selection and grouping, user maintenance, any link may trap new creators who just enter the industry.
The “Gravity Plan” launched by the platform is a one-stop cold start solution that allows creators to “move in with their luggage”, helping creators cross the most difficult threshold from “being able to make content” to “being able to close transactions”.
For new influencers, the “Gravity Plan” focuses on core problems such as live stream account building, account positioning, and product matching, providing ready-to-use practical support.
The account “Tina Fabric Review” which has been deeply engaged in the fabric field for 20 years is a typical case. Relying on this set of support, it completed the transformation from content creation to transaction, and achieved a million-level live stream performance during the 618 shopping festival. The role of the platform is not to complete sales on behalf of creators, but to lower the operation threshold, so that people with strong content capabilities can have the opportunity to get started.
For transforming influencers, the platform launched the “Best-seller Partner Plan” to solve the pain points of confusion in product selection and lack of ideas to create popular products. The popular science blogger “Fruit Hunter Yang Xiaoyang” transformed into an agriculture-supporting anchor, driving a sharp rise in the market popularity and share of Rong’an kumquats, which is inseparable from the platform’s supporting assistance in product docking and traffic reception.
Mid-tier creators can participate in the “Ascend Plan” to break the development bottleneck that the size of their fans cannot be converted into actual purchasing power. For example, the home appliance review account “Xiao Xiong Dian” delivered impressive results. With targeted support, it completed commercial advancement, and its transaction scale exceeded 100 million yuan in the first half of the year, proving that mid-tier creators also have huge operation potential.
The core of this echelon-based support model is not simply to distribute resources, but to provide certainty for development. Creators can clearly see their own stage, clarify their own needs, and understand what kind of support the platform can provide.
This sense of certainty is exactly the important cornerstone for creators to achieve long-term and stable operation.
According to Peng Yanyun’s disclosure at the summit, over the past year, Douyin E-Commerce has supported more than 550,000 creators through operation assistance. To further support creators and enable high-quality creators to gain more income and development opportunities, Douyin E-Commerce officially launched the Douyin E-Commerce Premium Selection Plan at the summit.
Peng Yanyun introduced that the selection criteria of this plan do not focus on the sales volume of a single live stream or only the number of fans, but focus on content output capability, operation stability, and the trust relationship established with fans. Selected creators can get multiple tangible benefits including exclusive traffic, cooperation opportunities with millions of high-quality merchants, and platform service fee discounts, to promote high-quality content to match good business opportunities, and enable sincere and professional creators to get the rewards they deserve.
In terms of tool products, the platform has also completed multi-dimensional iterations. The AI intelligent product selection tool simplifies product selection decisions, turning complex product screening and revenue calculation into lightweight interactions; the AI agent “Xiao Ying” can respond to creators’ operation questions at any time, helping creators improve operation efficiency and reduce operation costs in all aspects.
With all kinds of supporting support, “every earnest e-commerce creator can get returns as long as they work hard” has become a reality.
Diversified Paths and Operation Insights: Understand the Growth Logic of the New Generation of Live Streams
In the keynote sharing of the summit, Lin Xuan combined the massive live stream operation experience of the platform, annual ecosystem statistics and a large number of vivid cases of top creators, analyzed the evolution direction of the new generation of e-commerce live streams, and summarized a set of practical and reusable operation methodologies.
Lin Xuan started his sharing with a set of industry observation data reflecting the vitality of the ecosystem. Over the past year, the concurrent online viewers and daily likes of live streams both hit record highs; e-commerce short videos also ushered in an explosion, with nearly 5 million e-commerce short videos gaining over 1 million views each.
Lin Xuan, Head of Top Creator and Marketing at Douyin E-Commerce
Behind the massive data, there is no single style of content monopolizing the track, but a hundred flowers blooming in content expression forms. Origin tracing, outfit sharing, knowledge popularization, welfare promotion, content of different forms can all find their own audiences. “Every type of content corresponds to a type of preference” — this is Lin Xuan’s summary of the current e-commerce content ecosystem. Sincere expression and thorough explanation of users’ concerns are the core of content recognition.
Lin Xuan mentioned that in the early stage, live stream product selection prioritized business conditions, and there was a lack of long-term user operation experience.
The new generation of live streams that can achieve sustained results now usually have distinct personal aesthetics, professional product selection vision and life attitude. The hosts’ expression tends to be conversational, rather than straightforward promotion urging.
The product selection logic has also changed significantly. More judgments are made based on the real needs of users, rather than simply taking the level of cooperation commission as the standard. The transaction proportion from fans has become an important reference indicator to measure the health of live streams.
In the platform ecosystem, there is no unified template to reach the top, and creators with different characteristics can find their own upward paths.
There are entertainers who have accumulated public awareness through popular national film and television works, bringing their personal life aesthetics to the live stream; there are also entrepreneurs who own their own factories, achieving growth by relying on extremely high fan repurchase rates; there are also creators deeply engaged in niche aesthetics, who do not rely on aggressive promotion, but gain the popularity of young groups by sharing outfit concepts.
The growth cases of creators from different backgrounds and different tracks all show that influence, professional ability and niche appeal, any of the strengths can be converted into competitiveness in the e-commerce track.
A new mutually beneficial relationship has also been formed between creators and brands. Many brands have completed the new product launch through top creators, achieving the effect of being popular as soon as they go on the market; at major shopping festival nodes, high-quality creators can release several times more operation explosive power than usual.
Reviewing these creators who have achieved impressive results, Lin Xuan extracted a universal operation
