Have you ever seen the tiniest glimpse of something and just knew you absolutely had to buy it?
That might happen once in a blue moon to some of us, but the concept has made a Chinese influencer called Zheng Xiang Xiang wildly successful .
Streaming on Douyin, a Chinese equivalent to TikTok, she's become well-known for her lightning-paced showcases, where she shows off a huge list of products, but only giving each one a few seconds in the limelight (sometimes even less).
A video of one of her recent livestreams has been going crazy viral this week thanks to a Reddit post with more than 40,000 upvotes, and another on X (formerly Twitter) with nearly 100,000 likes.
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The video is less than 30 seconds long, but Zheng Xiang Xiang manages to get through a whole heap of tops, underwear, clothes hangers and even a hair dryer, each time just briefly showing it to her stream and then shoving it off her table.
If you're watching it wondering how anyone would be convinced to buy something by the stream, though, there's another key bit of information - her earnings have reportedly topped out at a wild $18.7 million in just a week.
That's huge money, and can only be accomplished by loads and loads of viewers making purchases, since the influencer presumably only gets a slice of affiliate revenue each time.
So, it's no exaggeration to suggest that this might be a look at the future of online shopping - or at least one of its futures.
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The Reddit thread under the video is full of people reacting to the sheer speed on show, too. One massively popular comment said: "It's still weird to me that the people watching this are just watching an advert, voluntarily, in their free time. I thought generally people try to avoid watching adverts?"
Another said: "Absolutely weird but I like how she slaps the boxes", and there definitely is something strangely absorbing about her technique.
It's worth clarifying that while the $18.7 million total has been widely reported, it's pretty hard to find a source for it confirming that it's definitely accurate, so it's possible that Zheng Xiang Xiang's earnings are not quite so astronomical as all that.
Still, it'll be curious to see whether Western platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels pick up the technique - maybe speed-shopping is set to become the next big thing worldwide.
Featured Image Credit: Reddit/yo-jin