China’s top e-commerce influencer, ‘Lipstick King’ Austin Li Jiaqi, abruptly ends Taobao show in major live-streaming snafu

China’s most popular live-streamer, Austin Li Jiaqi, on Friday abruptly halted his special online show pitching snacks and candies to millions of followers, marking a setback for the top e-commerce influencer’s sales campaign during the midyear 618 shopping festival.

Li’s show on Taobao Live, the live-streaming platform for merchants on Alibaba Group Holding’s Taobao Marketplace, suddenly stopped its feed just past 9pm – the prime time for sales on the mainland – to leave millions of fans watching online clueless about what happened. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

He issued a short notice at 9:26pm through Chinese microblogging service Weibo, saying that a team in the back office was sorting out the technical error. He asked his audience to “wait a moment”, but two hours later he again posted on Weibo to tell them that the show could not proceed owing to a “malfunction in back office equipment”.

That snafu has put pressure on Li, who has more than 64 million followers, to make up for the amount of sales lost on Friday via his next live-streamed shows as part of the midyear 618 retail gala, which is the country’s second-biggest shopping extravaganza after Singles’ Day.