Life Awards 2025
The Best Side-Turned-Main Hustle Award goes to live selling
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Homemaker Emily Tan conducts daily morning live streams, before going about her mum duties.
ST PHOTO: LIM YAOHUI
Follow topic:
SINGAPORE – If you own a smartphone, chances are, you would have bought something from a live stream in 2025.
From dental tablets to televisions, all manner of commodities has been hawked over the booming medium of live-selling, which some may argue reached a fever pitch in 2025.
Once the terrain of unashamed aunties and the S-Hook Ah Lian, live streams had a slower start in Singapore.
They were utilised mostly on Facebook and Instagram around the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, with a leisurely pace of sales and conversions. And then came TikTok.
Many credit TikTok Shop
Since establishing the e-commerce business in Singapore in 2022, TikTok has been aggressively growing both arms of the trade – coaxing brands to open storefronts on the platform, and training small and established content creators to become live sellers.
Rival Shopee Live, owned by Singapore-based Sea, is gaining speed too. Its live-stream sales and order contributions tripled between 2023 and 2024, according to a report from Campaign Asia.
But ByteDance-owned TikTok is owning the game – particularly in how quickly it is converting the humble nobody to jump on board and give the other side of the screen a try.
With an aim of training 400 live-stream hosts in 2025, TikTok introduced a Live Host Academy in March. Its first batch of more than 200 attendees – which included Gen X “aunties”
In the month-long introductory programme, participants are taught how to master the app’s interface, lighting and timed discount hacks, and to create promotional banners.
Ms Christina Gwee, 50, live-streaming and selling fruit on TikTok at Tiong Bahru Market. She was one of more than 200 content creators trained by TikTok’s Live Host Academy.
ST PHOTO: GAVIN FOO
Their labour has borne fruit. According to a report from TikTok in October, the number of affiliate creators has more than doubled year-on-year.
In the past year alone, TikTok Shop saw a 1.7 times increase in live hours streamed by affiliate creators, and a 6.3 times rise in e-commerce short videos – translating to immense growth of gross merchandise value (GMV).
In the same period, live GMV rose 136 per cent, and short video GMV grew 95 per cent. Overall affiliate GMV, generated from affiliate links on live and non-live videos, doubled.
In today’s brutal economy marked by growing unemployment and fears of lay-offs, live-selling’s low barrier to entry has democratised influence and the ability to generate sales – turning everyday folks into bona fide online stars with the potential to earn up to five- or six-figure salaries
Homemaker Emily Tan, 31, who goes by EmObsessed on TikTok, tried it on a whim during her downtime as a new mum in 2024 and never looked back.
The former relationship manager who worked in banking now conducts daily morning live streams, before going about her mum duties. In 2024, she transacted a total of $3.8 million in sales.
Homemaker Emily Tan selling Zappy wipes on live stream at the brand’s warehouse. In 2024, she transacted a total of $3.8 million in sales.
ST PHOTO: LIM YAOHUI
While success boils down to an ever-elusive winning formula of charisma, consistency and grit to put in the hours, the allure of “easy” money has continually drawn new faces to the trade.
Society’s rapid embrace of live streams has its chilling downside: the equally rapid rise in overconsumption. Impulse shopping has grown tenfold as a result – especially when the person onscreen is telling you the “exclusive” vouchers are on a first-come-first-served basis.
Live streamer and beauty entrepreneur Cheryl Chin, 24, noted its pervasive influence on even a casual viewer’s psyche. “On a live stream, you need to convince the customers why they should buy a product, and the price must be so attractive that if they don’t buy, they will have FOMO (fear of missing out). There’s a deep psychological mechanism you have to implement to make sure the live stream is successful.”
TikTok, not Instagram where she first found fame, is now the Singapore-based influencer’s strongest platform.
It may be a worrying enabler of thoughtless consumerism, but there is no denying the agency and access to new streams of income that live-streaming has brought to regular folks.
While the jury is still out on whether 2026 will hold a recession for Singapore, the prospects of live-selling as a viable side-turned-main hustle for more are looking bright.
