After months of rumors and testing, TikTok Shop has been activated for the app’s 150 million U.S. users. What is TikTok Shop? It’s TikTok’s central eCommerce play. It has several components but the best way to think about it is an eCommerce layer that straddles the app and makes content shoppable.
For example, brands can create shoppable product portfolios on their profile pages. TikTok creators can also tag products within their videos to make them shoppable. Those tags form a sort of taxonomy that references products from brands on TikTok, allowing creators to get attribution and affiliate revenue.
TikTok has been testing this model and onboarding brands and merchants since November of last year. Since then, It has signed up more than 200,000 brands, 90 percent of which based in the U.S., according to the company. meanwhile, 100,000 creators have signed up for the affiliate program.
As part of this U.S. rollout, TikTok Shop will blitz users in several in-app touchpoints. It will be planted as a tab on users’ home screens for dedicated shopping; within videos (via tags); shoppable ads; and affiliate programs for creators. This saturated exposure should give the initiative the traction it needs.
Taking Stock
The term “central eCommerce play” was used above deliberately. In fact, TikTok Shop is just one of several orbiting eCommerce initiatives as the relatively young TikTok continues to experiment. Taking stock of its full suite of offerings and initiatives so far, here’s a list to put the full picture in perspective.
TikTok Shop: The program examined above, which has evolved into several variations in different overseas markets.
Affiliate program: Also examined above, it helps TikTok shop reach scale through crowdsourced – and incentivized – shoppable content distribution.
Fulfilled by TikTok: a logistics as a service offering (similar to Amazon’s Buy with Prime) that sellers can use for secure checkout and shipping fulfillment.
Trendy Beats: TikTok’s ambitious play to expand from a marketplace model (TikTok Shop) to a full-fledged first-party seller, a la Amazon Basics.
eCommerce partnerships & integrations: The company partners with players like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud for direct integrations that allow merchants to distribute their products on TikTok.
#ticktockmademebuyit: a hashtag that’s less of a formal program and more of an organic phenomenon around users who purchase items they saw in TikTok videos. TikTok has leaned into the trend, which amplifies product interest and purchase intent towards its full range of eCommerce efforts. The hashtag has been viewed more than 59.3 billion times.
So there you have it… TikTok has several eCommerce balls in the air. Let us know if we missed any. Going forward, we project these interlocking initiatives to start to consolidate or coalesce as TikTok internalizes the results and adjusts accordingly. We’ll keep watching for signs along that evolutionary path.
