Live selling: the next big hustle sweeping Europe

Tinny music plays in a dimly lit basement as we watch a teenager pull football shirts off a nearby clothing rack and hold them up to the camera. He describes each item monotonously — the team, season, colour, and condition — before sticking on a numbered label and transferring them to another rack. Each item gets less than a minute in the limelight.

Bid rates and prices are listed at the bottom of the screen with eager buyers swiping a yellow bar to bid, while exchanging questions, comments, and emojis in the live chat box. When a buyer wins a bid, their username pops up with bursts of brightly coloured confetti. After live streaming for just over an hour, the teen has made €1,000 in sales. 

Generating this kind of cash on Vinted, eBay, Depop, or any other static peer-to-peer marketplace would have taken days, even weeks. Instead of writing detail-heavy ...