A new TikTok Shop feed has been made available to select users of the app, as the company continues to integrate ecommerce features with its existing service.
TikTok has been at the forefront of the social media shopping revolution. While platforms like Instagram have scaled back to some degree, TikTok has forged ahead, determined to replicate the success social media shopping has seen in Asian countries like China.
Last year, the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, generated upwards of $200 million in revenue from ecommerce. It’s unsurprising, then, that TikTok is committed to emulating this success in the West.
The TikTok Shop beta version was launched in April, with the feature slowly rolled out and made available to select digital retailers and brands.
Last month, TikTok added a range of new options to the Shop feature, adding in-app product overviews and purchase flows and allowing merchants to sync their product catalogs with the feature.
Now, select users of the app have noticed a new Shop tab appear at the top of their screen, next to the options for the For You and Following feeds. Clicking on the Shop tab opens up a brand-new feed, where users can view products, browse catalogs, and make purchases.
While still in a trial phase, and with no details regarding a wider public rollout, this is a significant step forward for TikTok and a clear indication that the company is still pushing its ecommerce arm.
We can expect to see further tests of different ecommerce features on TikTok in the coming months, as the company experiments to find the best way to popularise social media shopping in Western markets.
For digital marketers and influencers, this could prove to be a new way to market and advertise products on social media. Rather than using content as a means to direct customers towards products, they could be displayed directly in dedicated feeds.
What this means is we could see TikTok become more like Amazon. This will be an interesting shift and could indicate a wider change across the digital landscape as we see social media and ecommerce platforms integrate with one another.
