It’s not Tracie Reeves’s thick Tennessee twang that hooks viewers into the two-hour-long shows she broadcasts via Facebook Live, six times a week. “I don't know how they listen to my voice,” Reeves confides. “I’ve tried to watch the videos back. Can’t do it. I’m absolutely one of the most annoying people that I’ve ever heard.”

Beejoli Shah is a freelance journalist and a contributing editor for Pacific Standard. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Yet 25,000 Facebook fans tune in to watch Reeves—a bubbly, relatable young mother of four, with a habit of dropping F-bombs—do what she does surprisingly well: sell oysters over the internet. Specifically, it’s the cultured freshwater pearls, synthetically dyed in a prismatic array of hues; she sells them on her Live show, My Mermaid Treasure. Though Facebook’s live-streaming interface is better known for giving rise to viral one-offs like Chewbacca Mom, for Reeves and a host of other wannabe entrepreneurs, Live has provided a ready template just waiting to be hacked into an ecommerce tool.

Reeves isn’t the only woman on Facebook hosting “pearl parties”—a kind of virtual Avon party for bivalves, with a digital living room that can seat thousands. Like her pearl-shucking and shilling peers, she is a member of a growing group of small business owners who have keenly deputized Facebook Live to reach a broader fan base. Hosts regularly broadcast multiple times a week as they pry open oyster shells to reveal a cheap, colorful pearl inside, keeping viewers hooked with gimmicks including raffles, giveaways, and unyielding amounts of pep.

Scan across the Facebook Live map, and more often than not, someone will be selling you something: impossibly fuzzy blankets; vintage clothing; pearls. Facebook launched Live to all users in 2016, hoping to capitalize on the burgeoning live video trend and court high school and college-age users who were moving away from the platform toward competitors like Snapchat. But for small business owners, Live streaming has taken the passive ecommerce shopping experience and made it active, without ever forcing a shopper outside for human interaction. Sellers aren’t just selling pearls: They’re selling two hours of time—what Reeves calls “hanging in the comments”—chatting about relationships, motherhood, and, from time to time, pearls.

Despite this growing sector, Facebook hasn’t made ecommerce easy. The company hasn’t developed tools for Live users to streamline the commerce process, so Reeves, like many of her competitors, maintains her live, unedited video feed, while filling orders that trickle in via comments during broadcast. Transactions take place outside of Facebook, which often means directing clients to hacked systems of personal websites, Shopify pages, and PayPal invoice systems. Despite their burgeoning empires, sellers like Reeves often find themselves cobbling together the basic information they can squeeze out of Facebook to analyze their customer base and viewer demographics.

Still, drag your mouse over the center of the country on any given weeknight and you’ll find almost as many pearl parties as you do sermons on salvation. Pearl purveyors have found a powerful marketing tool in Facebook Live—more powerful tool than even Facebook seems to realize it has. Yet the biggest impediment to their success may end up being, well, Facebook.

In theory, Facebook Live was supposed solidify Facebook’s place in the future. Rushed to market in two months, it was an attempt to recoup the teenage customers that the platform was hemorrhaging. The streams of dynamic live video content would allow Facebook to compete with Snapchat, particularly with its rival’s popular brand-focused Discover feature. It earned a dedicated space within the mobile app, and all manner of celebrity and user-generated live streams populated its 2016 rollout.

In the months after Live’s launch, Facebook made flashy plans to sign on celebrity influencers, including Kevin Hart and Jennifer Lopez, to tout the benefits of the new Live product. But almost immediately, the platform was besieged by controversy: A Chicago man recorded his own shooting. Philando Castile’s girlfriend livestreamed his slaying at the hands of a police officer the following month. Facebook failed to predict the many ways Live would prove useful. The company didn’t envision that users would hack the tool into a last resort emergency line, or manipulate it to sell pearls on the internet. (After repeated media requests, Facebook declined to participate in this story.)