A Rotten Stool Exposes the Soft Core of China's Livestream Retail Machine
An 89.9-yuan wheeled stool sold by China's biggest livestream stores turned out to be stuffed with mouldy wood and scrap sponge — and the ensuing refund fight between Luo Yonghao and Yu Minhong has become a test of who pays when the influencer economy's quality control fails.
The product looked innocuous: a padded stool on castors, marketed as a wheeled perch for home or office and sold for 89.9 yuan through some of the biggest storefronts in Chinese livestreaming. Then buyers started posting what was inside. The seat's filling turned out to be mouldy wood planks, scrap sponge and cardboard — materials that smell as bad as they sound — supplied by a company registered barely three months before, with 100,000 yuan of capital, whose response when confronted was reportedly to call the construction "industry practice" and ask that unboxing videos be deleted.
What followed has turned a cheap stool into a national referendum on livestream retail. "Make a Friend" (交个朋友), the livestream channel fronted for years by Luo Yonghao, admitted a serious quality incident, pulled the product, cut the supplier and offered every buyer a refund with no need to return the stool. East Buy (东方甄选), the education-turned-commerce company founded by Yu Minhong and the stool's biggest online distributor at nearly ten million yuan of sales, has as of Monday offered no public apology and no matching refund programme. Luo has spent three consecutive days on Weibo pressing the comparison, and the tension between the two men — former business partners whose split three years ago was itself national news — has kept the story at the top of the trending boards.
The episode illustrates how the quality-control promise of livestream commerce actually works, and where it fails. Selection is done by the streamer's own buying team, which in this case, as one summary circulating on Weibo noted, checked appearance and sample documents but never opened the seat. The supplier passed inspection with a good specimen and shipped the rest with the fillings swapped — an information gap no unboxing was designed to close, because nobody unboxes a stool until it is too late. The scale at which top-tier streamers sell multiplies the exposure: a single listing on a top channel can move tens of thousands of units in a night.
For consumers, the stool story lands in a familiar place. Livestream selling built its promise on personality: this person tested the product, this person is accountable if it disappoints. The refund-no-returns gesture from Luo's side is precisely that bargain being honoured in public; East Buy's silence is the same bargain quietly declined. Weibo users have been voting with their comments, with many asking why the biggest distributor should face the least scrutiny — one widely shared post argued the selective outrage showed "流量光环" (traffic halo) at work: the bigger the brand, the softer the fall.
Regulators have not yet entered the story publicly, and that is the open question it leaves. China's consumer-rights apparatus has precedent for moving on livestream fraud, and the supplier's demand that videos be deleted — plus its claim that rotten fillings are normal — is exactly the kind of detail that tends to summon one. Until then, the stool sits as a metaphor no commentator has resisted: what the livestream economy sells, underneath the discounts and the personalities, is assurance. This week, for two of its biggest names, that product failed inspection.