(Yicai Global) Sept. 28 -- Alibaba Group Holding has set up the world's first cross-border e-commerce live-streaming center in Xuchang, China's so-called wig capital, to help get locally made hairpieces to global customers.

The hub was formed on Sept. 26 by Alibaba's cross-border e-commerce marketplace AliExpress and the Xuchang city government in China's central Henan province. AliExpress plans to build 10 across the country and train 100,000 e-commerce live-streamers.

Xuchang's has 20 live-streaming rooms that can handle more than 100 vendors and over 20 internet celebrities at the same time. It will stage at least 100 live-streaming events a month and help companies train online talent.

About 20 percent of sellers on AliExpress have started live-streaming, Ni Qianqing, head of the platform's wig business, told Yicai Global. Wigs are best-sellers, he said. Overseas buyers have made a beeline for the platform after brick-and-mortar stores closed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Turnover from western countries has doubled since April.

"I could visit five to 10 clients at most a day when selling wigs offline in the US, but now thousands of customers from countries worldwide flood into my live-streaming room when I start the process on my phone," said Liu Qiang, a saleswoman for a Xuchang maker of wigs for the US market.

Liu can sell USD1,000 to USD5,000 of the products in one live-streaming session, USD80 to USD150 for each buyer, she said.

"Xuchang will use the successful practice of live-streaming in more fields such as garment, accessories, cosmetics, and toys to help more merchants go abroad digitally," Wang Peng, director of AliExpress' social media content and open ecosystem, told Yicai Global.

The number of liver-streamers on AliExpress has risen sevenfold over the past year, and the number of live-streaming events has quadrupled, Wang added, saying that the percentage of turnover from live-streaming in AliExpress' gross merchandise volume jumped nearly 10 times.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Peter Thomas