The annual Spring Festival Gala on CCTV proved to be magic for online sales.

A magic show performed during the gala by Liu Qian, a Taiwanese magician, has drawn a lot of attention. Audience members now want to try their hand at magic themselves.

Hu Kunfeng, a 25-year-old online shopper, bought a magnetic ring similar to what Liu wears on his fingers from the Beautiful Messenger shop on taobao.com, the largest online retailer in Asia. He bought the ring for his 13-year-old brother, who was amazed by Liu's magic at the gala, Hu told the Global Times Sunday.

"Liu Qian's performance at the Spring Festival Gala was really fantastic. If the goods [I bought this time] look good, I will buy several for myself," he said.

Sales of magic props, particularly rings, coins and poker cards, have seen a substantial increase since the gala, Bao Shuli, proprietor of Beautiful Messenger, told the Global Times Sunday.

The magnetic ring is one of the shop's hot buys, and more than 150 had been sold as of Sunday since New Year's Eve, compared with total sales of over 400 until Sunday since late November, according to Beautiful Messenger's sales records.

In addition to the sales of magic props fueled by the magician's performance, the sales of other items including contact lenses similar to those worn by Wang Fei, a popular Chinese singer, also have seen a rise, a Taobao report released over the weekend said. Many glasses shops on taobao.com saw sales of contact lenses increase in recent days, Taobao said in the report.

Sales of CDs of the Little Tigers, a Taiwanese band, were fueled by the Spring Festival Gala as well. The band, formed in the late 1980s and disbanded in the 1990s, reunited at the gala, arousing nostalgia in many people born in the 1980s. Some of the band's CDs were even priced at several thousand yuan, according to Taobao's report.

Online shopping during the Spring Festival as a whole also saw a boom. Sales on taobao. Com, China's largest Internet retail platform, totaled 1.7 billion yuan ($248.90 million) during the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday from February 13-20.

Sales of rechargeable phone cards reached 400 million yuan ($58.57 million) during the eight-day holiday. Airline tickets were also very popular online, with sales of tickets on the last day of the holiday exceeding 9,000, according to data collected by Taobao. Online hong bao, a traditional red paper bag containing money given during Spring Festival, are also popular now. Taobao's Alipay, the country’s largest third-party online payment platform, said that the number of hong bao given via Alipay during Spring Festival rose 100 percent from a year earlier to reach about 15,000 transactions a day.

Valentine's Day falling on the Chinese Lunar New Year's Day also contributed to the sales boom during the holiday. Over the past half month, more than 1 million roses were sold on Taobao every day, the company said.

Source: ccsics’s blog