Platform Ecosystems and Value Co-Creation in Chinese Livestream Commerce: A Scoping Review

Livestream commerce is a new type of digital retail in China, where live video, social interactions, product presentation and in-stream selling coexist in platform-based ecosystems. Existing studies on the co-creation of value between platforms, creators, merchants and consumers are still scattered across marketing, e-commerce and communication and information systems. This scoping review outlines the features, theoretical frameworks, value co-creation processes, competitive landscape, and research gaps of Chinese livestream commerce. A search of SciSpace, SciSpace Full-Text, and Google Scholar was conducted and resulted in the identification of 1,196 records from 2016 to September 2026, guided by PRISMA-ScR and JBI guidance, and the Population-Concept-Context framework. 743 unique records were found after removing 453 duplicates. The pragmatic relevance-ranking cutoff moved 500 records to title and abstract screening, 22 sources to full text assessment and 17 sources to the descriptive and thematic evidence mapping. Five themes were identified, which were platform ecosystem architecture, value co-creation through interaction and community, consumer behaviour and purchase intention, competitive strategy and business-model innovation and theoretical applications. Evidence focused on Douyin and consumers, with little focus on merchants, platform operators, governance, longitudinal change, and the creation of markets. Since 243 records were not screened for eligibility, the search excluded major international and Chinese-language databases, screening and charting was undertaken by a single assessor and no formal quality appraisal was undertaken, the findings are presented as a provisional map and not in an exhaustive or quality weighted fashion

Chinese livestream commerce; platform ecosystem; value co-creation

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