Arzigul Yasin used to sell cosmetics until early this year, but now she spends time on promoting naan - the staple wheat bread of Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region - through livestreaming platforms.

In the first two months of this year when the COVID-19 epidemic broke out, Arzigul, from Uygur ethic group, stayed at home due to the travel restrictions, so she opened an account on Douyin, a popular Chinese short-video platform, just to kill time.

"I found many users on the platform promoting products, which surprised me. So I opened my own account to sell cosmetics," said the 30-year-old, who had a cosmetic shop in Jiashi county in southern Xinjiang's Kashgar prefecture.

However, the online cosmetic business did not turn out to be as profitable as she had hoped, so she began looking for a new business idea.