DHgate Scales Low-Latency Live Streams with Amazon IVS

The retail landscape in China has undergone significant changes due to the rise of ecommerce and the increasing popularity of social media platforms. According to Harvard Business Review, online sales in China “have grown about 25% in each of the past seven years and reached about $1.9 trillion in 2020.” As a result, traditional brick-and-mortar stores have had to adapt to stay competitive by finding solutions that enable them to connect with a global audience.

DHgate is a leading B2B cross-border ecommerce marketplace in China, reaching millions of people with products and services through global operations and offices, including in the US and UK. According to metrics shared by DHgate with Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), the platform has served more than 59.6 million registered buyers from 225 countries by connecting them to over 2.54 million sellers globally. As part of its turnkey services, DHgate offers vendors the option to highlight their products through high-quality, low-latency live streams, which are delivered at up to 1080p using Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) on AWS.

Looking to integrate a comprehensive live broadcast solution, the company evaluated a few options before selecting Amazon IVS. Wentao Liu, VP of Technology, DHgate, explained, “Amazon IVS is a great, fully managed live streaming solution. It’s highly stable and relatively simple to deploy, and it also seamlessly integrates with our other AWS services.”

In about three days, the team had Amazon IVS fully up and running without tapping AWS support. Thus far, the platform has hosted more than 400 broadcasters, with more than 50 channels live simultaneously, and has hit a peak audience of 10,000 viewers to date. This solution is not only efficient but also cost-effective, with an auto-scaling feature that adapts based on service volume.

Operating on global rendering nodes, the integration with IVS has opened up new possibilities for digital human livestreaming, empowering sellers and businesses to enhance their ecommerce platforms and engage with global customers. Vendors can live stream with traditional human hosts or select a virtual character from the DHgate avatar library to deliver a customized script that can output a broad range of languages.

“Amazon IVS provides a one-stop solution for our live streaming business requirements for both digital human broadcasters and real human broadcasters. It increases the stability of our live streaming, which improves our live commerce conversion rate,” noted Liu.

The channel, stream server address, and stream key are automatically generated by the API and displayed to the user when a live stream is launched on the platform. At the same time, the playback URL is generated for the video player, completing the live broadcast chain in seconds. Live stream viewers can interact with the hosts through the built-in chat feature of Amazon IVS, and the service’s timed metadata capabilities ensure that product details that appear on screen are synced with the video.

By providing customers with more personalized and engaging shopping experiences, innovative solutions like Amazon IVS will continue to help retailers stay relevant and competitive in an ever-evolving retail landscape.

In addition to Amazon IVS, other AWS solutions in the DHgate workflow include Amazon Elastic Compute (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Polly text-to-speech service, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon DynamoDB fully managed serverless database, and Amazon ElastiCache.

To learn more about building with scalable, live video streams, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/ivs/

About DHgate

Founded in 2004, DHgate has become the leading B2B cross-border ecommerce marketplace in China. Through their global operations and offices, including in the US and UK, DHgate has reached millions of people with trusted products and services. As of December 31, 2022, DHgate served more than 59.6 million registered buyers from 225 countries and regions by connecting them to over 2.54 million sellers in China and other countries, with over 34 million live listings on the platform annually. For more information, please visit dhgate.com and follow @DHgate.com