On last year, TikTok announced a global partnership with international e-commerce giant Shopify, a Canadian e-commerce platform. TikTok is going into e-commerce.
TikTok officially announces its entry into e-commerce
Shopify tweeted the official announcement:
On the same day on Twitter, Shopify also posted a TikTok video with a few big blue letters saying: Shopify merchants can now use TikTok for business.
Merchants can create a TikTok for business account on TikTok and then select the products they want to showcase, after which video ads are automatically generated, and users can click to buy and pay directly to the merchant’s Shopify shop.
TikTok also has ready-made templates designed specifically for merchants, which merchants of any size can use to generate ads through TikTok. Merchants can also target their audience by gender, age, user behavior, and video category directly in the Shopify backend and then track the effectiveness of their ads over time, with the cost of the ads based on the merchant’s business objectives and their expectations.
Shopify merchants can also install a tool called “TikTok Pixel” to more easily track the conversions driven by TikTok ads. Also, to encourage businesses to advertise more on TikTok, TikTok is offering almost all businesses an incentive payment of US$300 for ad placement.
The current partnership between TikTok and Shopify is already live in the US, with additional markets in North America, Europe, and South East Asia to follow in early 2021. Shopify and TikTok will also work together to test new features to optimize further merchants’ videos and profiles in the coming months.
Behind the partnership of TikTok and Shopify
Reasons for their collaboration：
- TikTok is one of the fastest-growing entertainment platforms globally, with over 100 million users in the US alone.
- TikTok is the most downloaded app shop with over 2 billion downloads.
- The average user spends 52 minutes a day on TikTok.
As you can see, one of the critical factors that made this partnership possible for Shopify and other merchant communities was the sheer volume of traffic on TikTok.
Shopify’s current strategy is exactly that: to take advantage of online sales and target the growing trend of multi-channel demand. After all, the epidemic has boosted Shopify’s GMV.
Meanwhile, an official TikTok study showed that 88% of users said they found new content they liked while using TikTok, and about half said they found new products through ads posted by brands on TikTok.
Based on this, TikTok believes that brands are an essential part of users’ TikTok experience and that TikTok users like to be associated with brands that interest them. Through this partnership, Shopify merchants will be able to more easily tap into the creativity of the TikTok community, be discovered by more users, and their marketing will be optimized.
Blake Chandlee, Vice President of Global Business Solutions at TikTok, said that: We are delighted to be working with Shopify to provide merchants with a channel to reach new audiences and drive sales. We are constantly exploring innovative ways to connect brands and users, and Shopify is the perfect partner to help us grow and expand our global commerce capabilities.
It is easy to see that TikTok is more interested in the commercial capabilities of the platform as a result of the continued presence of brands. In the future, TikTok will be labeled not only as a popular short-form social video app but also as an “eye-catching and gold-sucking” e-commerce channel.
Shopify is not the first company to realize that TikTok can be a social shopping platform
Previously, Walmart said on its official website:
TikTok itself has been adding to its tools for merchants and other social shopping features. For example, TikTok has allowed users to add links to e-commerce platforms in their profiles so far.
Walmart is looking at TikTok’s integration of e-commerce and advertising and wants to grow its marketing and advertising business significantly through the partnership. The media’s view is that TikTok’s ability to drive merchant traffic and sales is the main reason for Walmart’s partnership with TikTok.
In June this year, Walmart also partnered with Shopify to expand its online marketplace business, which resulted in good online sales in the face of the epidemic.
TikTok’s e-commerce presence is an irresistible trend
Since 2016, live e-commerce has been more than four years. In 2019, live e-commerce became the hottest trend, and the total GMV of live e-commerce for the year was estimated by research to be over 300 billion yuan.
By this year, due to the epidemic’s impact, live e-commerce has even ushered in a traffic bonus period. At the beginning of the rise of TikTok, people were looking at the buzz, but now people are seeing business opportunities.
Now TikTok has started to enter e-commerce, we will see how the short video industry will develop in the future.