Tiktok Shop: Is it coming to Europe soon? -News – Breaking Latest News

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In Asia, Tiktok already sells hundreds of billions of dollars worth of goods, mostly to young people. Can the social media app do the same for us?

In China, Li Jiaqi is also known as the “Lipstick King”. The 31-year-old influencer is active on social media apps like Tiktok and on Chinese online shopping platforms like Taobao. Hundreds of millions of people follow him on all of these channels.

Li Jiaqi got his nickname on November 11, 2021 (Chinese “Singles Day”) when he sold around 15,000 lipsticks during a live stream – within five minutes.

Li Jiagi’s example may be a record, but livestream shopping has become an integral part of Chinese e-commerce. And the sales are huge: goods worth 208 billion US dollars were sold on Tiktok, which is called Douyin in China, in 2022.

The so-called “social commerce” is seen by many as the future of online shopping – as a kind of teleshopping for the younger generations, to whom influencers in social media apps make products attractive that they can order to their homes within seconds.

An automatic shopping link for each product

Tiktok has its own shopping function, which is only available in the app in China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, the United Kingdom and the USA.

There, searching for a term or product from the search results can lead directly to the Tiktok shop. Practical for Generation Z, for whom the app now also serves as a search engine.

Tiktok subsidizes its retailers

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The success of Tiktok shopping in China and Southeast Asia also has to do with the fact that Tiktok has “subsidized” its retailers there for a long time – for example, by the company covering the difference when products were offered at a discount price.

For a long time, Tiktok only charged a fee of 2 percent of the sales price for every sale. This is far less than other online shopping platforms. Even if this fee is set to rise to 8 percent in July, as announced, the Tiktok shop will still remain more attractive than the competition for many sellers.

That’s not all: If an influencer presents a product in a live stream or video, what is shown can be supplemented with a link to the shop, marked by a small orange shopping cart. And Tiktok is currently testing a new function: It should automatically recognize what can be seen in a video and then set a link that leads to the corresponding product in the shop or suggests an alternative there.

Facebook and Co. without shopping success

It has been suspected for some time that Tiktok wants to soon open the virtual doors of its shop in Europe and take on its major competitor Amazon. To this end, the company is planning department stores and logistics chains in order to be able to supply its European customers more quickly and make returns possible.

What are the chances that Tiktok – which is backed by the Chinese company Bytedance – will also become an online shopping giant here? Other social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest have already tried this, each with moderate success.

The algorithm knows what you like

However, Tiktok has great potential: Young people in particular spend a lot of time on the app and are receptive to the way influencers promote goods there. And the Tiktok algorithm quickly recognizes what you like and subsequently shows new videos with products that entice you to make impulse purchases – for example, when an influencer tests a face cream that can be bought immediately via a shopping link.

The fact that there is a lot of junk among the goods offered in the Tiktok shop does not seem to bother customers in Europe. Finally, a similar offer can also be found on Chinese online shopping portals such as Shein or Temu, which have also been used extensively in this country for some time.

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