On 1 February 2026, new rules governing livestreaming e-commerce came into force in China - among the most significant regulatory changes the category has seen since it emerged as a major retail channel. For overseas brands selling, or planning to sell, into China through livestream channels, understanding what changed is now a basic operational matter, not an optional compliance consideration.
Why live commerce matters for imported goods
Live commerce - livestreaming video paired with real-time purchasing - has become a primary retail channel in China over the past several years. Hosts broadcast on platforms including Douyin and Taobao Live, presenting products to live audiences who can buy without leaving the stream. It merges entertainment, social engagement, and shopping in a way that has driven substantial sales volume across many categories.
Imported goods have benefited disproportionately. Food and health supplements, beauty and skincare, and lifestyle products are among the categories sold most often via livestream. The format lets consumers see a product used and explained in real time, and ask questions before buying - reducing some of the uncertainty that comes with an unfamiliar imported brand.
The scale is hard to ignore. Livestreaming e-commerce accounts for a growing share of all online retail in China, and a host doesn't need a mass following to move meaningful volume for a niche imported product in the right category. For imported health supplements, functional food, and premium lifestyle brands, live commerce has become a channel no serious China market strategy can skip.
What the regulations require
China's Measures for the Supervision and Administration of Livestreaming E-commerce (Order No. 117) were jointly issued by the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) and the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) on 18 December 2025, taking effect on 1 February 2026. They set binding obligations for every major participant in the chain: platforms, livestream room operators, hosts, and the service agencies that manage them.
Identity verification is mandatory. Platforms must verify the real identity and credentials of room operators and hosts before they can broadcast, refreshed at least every six months. Room operators must in turn verify and hold the credentials of the merchants whose products they sell, and confirm host identity before each broadcast. The goal is a traceable chain of responsibility, not an anonymous account behind every stream.
Records must be kept for three years. Livestream video replay, interaction logs, order and payment details, logistics data, and after-sales records all have to be retained for a minimum of three years from transaction completion - an audit trail the industry has not consistently maintained, and one regulators can now pull in the event of a complaint or investigation.
Hosts must be trained before they can sell. Marketing personnel must complete training - covering transaction law, product safety, and consumer protection - before their first commercial livestream, with annual refreshers after that. It's a training obligation, not a licensing scheme, but it has teeth: hosts who falsify training records or refuse to take part can be barred from broadcasting commercially.
Platforms can no longer sit on the sidelines. They must take active steps to prevent and address false or misleading commercial information, including AI-generated content, rather than functioning as passive hosts of third-party claims. Where a platform knows or reasonably should know a room operator or host is non-compliant, it has to act - a real shift in responsibility onto the platform itself.
AI-generated content is now explicitly in scope. Any AI-generated human image or video used during a livestream must be clearly and continuously labelled as such, so viewers are reminded throughout the broadcast. Using AI to fabricate claims or impersonate someone for commercial promotion is expressly banned - a direct response to the synthetic hosts and fake review content that had proliferated beforehand.
How liability is now distributed
Before February 2026, enforcement tended to focus on platform-level violations or the most blatant individual fraud cases. Where a brand's responsibility began and ended when a third-party host made claims on its behalf was rarely tested.
The new Measures don't rewrite that question outright, but they change the practical answer. Room operators must verify and hold merchant credentials; platforms, room operators, hosts, and agencies all carry direct obligations - and penalties - for false claims made on stream. Brand liability for what an independent host or distributor says still runs primarily through China's existing Advertising Law, which already holds a brand acting as advertiser jointly liable for commissioned promotional content. What Order 117 adds is verification, retention, and active policing that make it far harder, in practice, for a brand to plausibly claim it didn't know what was being said about its product.
For overseas brands selling through Chinese distributors or KOL partners, that means the contractual and oversight arrangements governing those relationships need to assume a much thinner ability to disclaim knowledge than existed before February 2026.
What the old environment got wrong
The pre-2026 live commerce environment had well-documented problems. Fake endorsements - fabricated celebrity ties, manufactured social proof - were widespread. Inflated sales counters, displayed mid-stream to manufacture urgency, were routine. Misleading health claims, especially for supplements and functional foods, were common, and enforcement was patchy at best.
AI-generated content compounded the problem. Synthetic hosts, AI-voiced reviews, and algorithmically generated testimonials blurred the line between a genuine endorsement and a fabricated one - often in ways consumers couldn't detect and the old rules didn't address.
Order 117 closes that gap directly: three years of retained records means past activity can be reviewed; active platform obligations give operators a reason to police content rather than ignore it; and the AI provisions bring synthetic endorsement inside the regulatory perimeter for the first time.
Practical considerations for imported brands
For brands selling live commerce into China - directly or through distributors - a few things follow immediately.
Know what's being said about your product. Visibility into on-stream claims is no longer just good marketing hygiene - it's a compliance-relevant question. Brands should have a way to review or sign off on key messaging before it airs.
Substantiate every health claim. Any health-related claim made on a livestream needs evidence behind it and must meet Chinese advertising and health-claim rules. An unsupported therapeutic claim from a host is exposure for the brand, not just the host.
Build compliance into livestream contracts. Agreements with distributors, KOL agencies, or individual hosts should now explicitly cover what claims are permitted, how AI-generated content can or can't be used, and what happens if something goes wrong.
Review any AI-avatar arrangements. If a brand or its partners are using AI-generated hosts as a cost-saving measure, those arrangements need checking against the new prohibition on AI misuse for false demonstrations or endorsements.
Understand how your platform is enforcing this. Douyin, Taobao Live, and other major platforms are each working out what implementation looks like in practice - and that shapes what compliance actually requires of a brand day to day.
Reviewing existing arrangements
For brands already live in China's live commerce market, this is a natural point to audit what's in place: what identity verification exists for current host relationships, whether historical claims could face retrospective scrutiny, and whether distributor and KOL contracts reflect the new liability picture. The three-year retention window already covers activity from before the rules took effect, so anything broadcast in recent months is not beyond reach.
Brands not yet in live commerce have it easier - the clearer rules make it simpler to build compliance in from day one, rather than retrofit it later.
Further readings from the official Chinese government
Why live commerce matters for imported goods
Live commerce - livestreaming video paired with real-time purchasing - has become a primary retail channel in China over the past several years. Hosts broadcast on platforms including Douyin and Taobao Live, presenting products to live audiences who can buy without leaving the stream. It merges entertainment, social engagement, and shopping in a way that has driven substantial sales volume across many categories.
Imported goods have benefited disproportionately. Food and health supplements, beauty and skincare, and lifestyle products are among the categories sold most often via livestream. The format lets consumers see a product used and explained in real time, and ask questions before buying - reducing some of the uncertainty that comes with an unfamiliar imported brand.
The scale is hard to ignore. Livestreaming e-commerce accounts for a growing share of all online retail in China, and a host doesn't need a mass following to move meaningful volume for a niche imported product in the right category. For imported health supplements, functional food, and premium lifestyle brands, live commerce has become a channel no serious China market strategy can skip.
What the regulations require
China's Measures for the Supervision and Administration of Livestreaming E-commerce (Order No. 117) were jointly issued by the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) and the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) on 18 December 2025, taking effect on 1 February 2026. They set binding obligations for every major participant in the chain: platforms, livestream room operators, hosts, and the service agencies that manage them.
Identity verification is mandatory. Platforms must verify the real identity and credentials of room operators and hosts before they can broadcast, refreshed at least every six months. Room operators must in turn verify and hold the credentials of the merchants whose products they sell, and confirm host identity before each broadcast. The goal is a traceable chain of responsibility, not an anonymous account behind every stream.
Records must be kept for three years. Livestream video replay, interaction logs, order and payment details, logistics data, and after-sales records all have to be retained for a minimum of three years from transaction completion - an audit trail the industry has not consistently maintained, and one regulators can now pull in the event of a complaint or investigation.
Hosts must be trained before they can sell. Marketing personnel must complete training - covering transaction law, product safety, and consumer protection - before their first commercial livestream, with annual refreshers after that. It's a training obligation, not a licensing scheme, but it has teeth: hosts who falsify training records or refuse to take part can be barred from broadcasting commercially.
Platforms can no longer sit on the sidelines. They must take active steps to prevent and address false or misleading commercial information, including AI-generated content, rather than functioning as passive hosts of third-party claims. Where a platform knows or reasonably should know a room operator or host is non-compliant, it has to act - a real shift in responsibility onto the platform itself.
AI-generated content is now explicitly in scope. Any AI-generated human image or video used during a livestream must be clearly and continuously labelled as such, so viewers are reminded throughout the broadcast. Using AI to fabricate claims or impersonate someone for commercial promotion is expressly banned - a direct response to the synthetic hosts and fake review content that had proliferated beforehand.
How liability is now distributed
Before February 2026, enforcement tended to focus on platform-level violations or the most blatant individual fraud cases. Where a brand's responsibility began and ended when a third-party host made claims on its behalf was rarely tested.
The new Measures don't rewrite that question outright, but they change the practical answer. Room operators must verify and hold merchant credentials; platforms, room operators, hosts, and agencies all carry direct obligations - and penalties - for false claims made on stream. Brand liability for what an independent host or distributor says still runs primarily through China's existing Advertising Law, which already holds a brand acting as advertiser jointly liable for commissioned promotional content. What Order 117 adds is verification, retention, and active policing that make it far harder, in practice, for a brand to plausibly claim it didn't know what was being said about its product.
For overseas brands selling through Chinese distributors or KOL partners, that means the contractual and oversight arrangements governing those relationships need to assume a much thinner ability to disclaim knowledge than existed before February 2026.
What the old environment got wrong
The pre-2026 live commerce environment had well-documented problems. Fake endorsements - fabricated celebrity ties, manufactured social proof - were widespread. Inflated sales counters, displayed mid-stream to manufacture urgency, were routine. Misleading health claims, especially for supplements and functional foods, were common, and enforcement was patchy at best.
AI-generated content compounded the problem. Synthetic hosts, AI-voiced reviews, and algorithmically generated testimonials blurred the line between a genuine endorsement and a fabricated one - often in ways consumers couldn't detect and the old rules didn't address.
Order 117 closes that gap directly: three years of retained records means past activity can be reviewed; active platform obligations give operators a reason to police content rather than ignore it; and the AI provisions bring synthetic endorsement inside the regulatory perimeter for the first time.
Practical considerations for imported brands
For brands selling live commerce into China - directly or through distributors - a few things follow immediately.
Know what's being said about your product. Visibility into on-stream claims is no longer just good marketing hygiene - it's a compliance-relevant question. Brands should have a way to review or sign off on key messaging before it airs.
Substantiate every health claim. Any health-related claim made on a livestream needs evidence behind it and must meet Chinese advertising and health-claim rules. An unsupported therapeutic claim from a host is exposure for the brand, not just the host.
Build compliance into livestream contracts. Agreements with distributors, KOL agencies, or individual hosts should now explicitly cover what claims are permitted, how AI-generated content can or can't be used, and what happens if something goes wrong.
Review any AI-avatar arrangements. If a brand or its partners are using AI-generated hosts as a cost-saving measure, those arrangements need checking against the new prohibition on AI misuse for false demonstrations or endorsements.
Understand how your platform is enforcing this. Douyin, Taobao Live, and other major platforms are each working out what implementation looks like in practice - and that shapes what compliance actually requires of a brand day to day.
Reviewing existing arrangements
For brands already live in China's live commerce market, this is a natural point to audit what's in place: what identity verification exists for current host relationships, whether historical claims could face retrospective scrutiny, and whether distributor and KOL contracts reflect the new liability picture. The three-year retention window already covers activity from before the rules took effect, so anything broadcast in recent months is not beyond reach.
Brands not yet in live commerce have it easier - the clearer rules make it simpler to build compliance in from day one, rather than retrofit it later.
Further readings from the official Chinese government