For decades, Yiwu has built its reputation as China's quintessential small-commodity hub, where daily goods flow from local storefronts to buyers around the world.

Now, this eastern Chinese city is undergoing a digital transformation, leveraging artificial intelligence, cross-border e-commerce and livestreaming to upgrade its brick-and-mortar marketplace into a world-class digital trade ecosystem.

A key witness and participant in this transformation is Jin Haomin, Party branch secretary of the Yiwu Futian subdistrict social e-commerce association, and an early pioneer of livestream commerce in Jiangbeixiazhu village. His experience reflects the broader changes sweeping across Yiwu's e-commerce sector.

Jiangbeixiazhu village, widely regarded as one of China's top livestreaming e-commerce villages, has developed a complete supply chain and cultivated a vibrant startup community for content creators and online retailers.

According to Jin, the village is home to over 8,000 e-commerce players and more than 2,000 brands. It handles an average of over 5 million orders per day, with 20,000 practitioners pursuing their entrepreneurial dreams there.

Jin himself once ran a cross-stitch manufacturing business before pivoting to livestreaming and supply chain services in response to shifting consumer trends.

"Thanks to Yiwu's comprehensive commodity supply, low startup thresholds and inclusive business environment, more than 200 e-commerce villages have emerged in Yiwu. Local sellers prefer sharing traffic and resources rather than engaging in cutthroat competition," Jin explained.

Cost-performance will no longer be the sole competitive edge; emotional value and brand building will help merchants stand out amid intensifying industry homogenization, Jin noted.

The application of AI is further reshaping Yiwu's export landscape, rewriting the rules for small businesses seeking global growth.

Wang Xinfu, a prominent local livestream entrepreneur known by his online alias "Brother Seaweed", has expanded his business from domestic livestream sales to cross-border trade, and now offers customized AI digital human solutions to local manufacturers to help curb operational costs.

"AI's core strength lies in reducing costs and improving efficiency for small and medium-sized merchants. It covers the entire industry chain, from product design and short-video production to multilingual overseas customer acquisition," Wang said.

"AI-generated digital human videos have proven effective for Yiwu's export-oriented sellers, yet large-scale AI livestreaming remains unfeasible due to platform regulatory restrictions and immature underlying technology."

To date, more than 30,000 local merchants have adopted AI tools in their daily operations, with early adopters reporting an average order increase of more than 30 percent.

Last year, Yiwu city's e-commerce transaction volume reached 553.78 billion yuan ($81.84 billion), while cross-border e-commerce transactions approached 168 billion yuan. With 830,000 registered e-commerce entities, 40 percent of local players have ventured into cross-border businesses. Livestream commerce stood out as a signature growth driver, generating 85.6 billion yuan in retail sales last year.

In October, the Yiwu Global Digital Trade Center was put into operation. With an investment of 8.3 billion yuan, this flagship project is recognized as a provincial-level key initiative to bolster the open economy and digital trade.

The multifunctional complex has been hailed by Liu Jie, governor of Zhejiang province, as a powerful new engine driving digital trade across the province.

Zhu Xingping, deputy general manager of the center, noted that the platform removes the time and geographic constraints that have long plagued traditional wholesale markets. "Over the next five years, we will accelerate the full digital upgrading of physical markets and build a year-round digital trade exhibition that never closes," Zhu said.

The sprawling facility hosts many merchants who are young entrepreneurs owning independent brands or intellectual property products. Powered by a self-developed large language model, the center provides over a dozen AI-driven tools covering intelligent design, multilingual translation and automated video generation.

Equipped with full-coverage 10G ultra-high-speed broadband, more than 80,000 stores have evolved into 24/7 livestreaming studios catering to global buyers.

An official of Yiwu said the city's top priority is bridging the digital gap for small-scale exporters and empowering micro and small enterprises to tap into overseas markets.