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Top line
Generation Z’s social media of choice TikTok is the latest tech company to introduce in-app shopping features that will allow users to purchase products directly from merchants, potentially helping the platform to capitalize on the growth of electronic commerce.
Kylie Jenner will participate in TikTok’s shopping pilot program, the platform announced on Tuesday.
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Highlights
TikTok has partnered with Shopify, an e-commerce platform from Canada, to allow merchants to add a shopping tab to their TikTok profile and create a “mini storefront” for customers to purchase their products. in the application as part of a pilot test.
Users will also be able to “tag” products in TikTok posts and link directly to where the item can be purchased, much like a feature offered by Instagram.
To take advantage of the new shopping features, pilot users must be Shopify merchants with a TikTok For Business account.
What to watch out for
A number of Canadian merchants will participate in the purchase pilot project within a few weeks, and TikTok said the company plans to expand the functionality to other countries in the coming months.
Tangent
One of the first users to take advantage of the new feature will be reality TV star and makeup mogul Kylie Jenner, who sells her multi-million dollar Kylie Cosmetics brand to her nearly 35 million subscribers on TikTok. “I built my business on social media,” Jenner said in a statement Tuesday. “This is where my fans go first to research what’s new from Kylie Cosmetics.”
Large number
$ 36.6 billion. That’s the revenue e-commerce will generate by the end of 2021 in the United States alone, according to an estimate by research firm eMarketer. This is a jump of almost 40% from the previous year. Much of the growth was due to the coronavirus crackdown, when physical stores were closed and customers turned to online shopping while spending more time on social media platforms, according to the report. .
Key context
TikTok is the latest platform to dive into social commerce amid a wave of social media companies betting on the discovery and purchase of new products by users they see on their screens. Instagram first launched shopping features in 2018 and has continued to give more screen time and resources to ecommerce on the app. Snapchat, Twitter, and Pinterest have also invested in their shopping features to capture revenue from the recent ecommerce boom. TikTok first announced a partnership with Spotify in October.
Further reading
Social commerce surpasses $ 30 billion in US (Insider)
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