Have you ever wondered why TikTok is so insistent on punching in-stream shopping, regardless of whether or not it’ll take off in Western markets? This statement from The Information should help provide some context:

“Consumers in China last year spent 1.41 trillion yuan, or $US208 billion, buying things on ByteDance’s Douyin video app, the Chinese equivalent of TikTok, an increase of 76% from 2021, according to two people with knowledge of the internal data. Meanwhile, shoppers on TikTok in Southeast Asia more than quadrupled their spending, a metric known as gross merchandise volume, to $US4.4 billion, the people said.”

Surge Protection

As has been evident for a while now, in-app shopping is a particularly huge trend in Asian markets, and it continues to grow. Within this, TikTok’s parent company, ByetDance, logically sees expanded opportunity, especially with TikTok’s meteoric rise in the West. The opportunity, provided that TikTok gets it right, is huge. In fact, it has become such a known choice that other major platforms have begun their own integration projects, even Twitter.

Chief Twite Elon Musk has repeatedly stated that he wants to turn Twitter into an ‘everything app’, much like China’s WeChat through which consumers could practically do anything, socialization, gaming, shopping, you name it! True enough, the adoption of social and messaging apps for expanded use has been a transformative shift in China, yet despite various pushes, Western consumers just haven’t warmed up to the same behaviors.

Tap-to-pay processes have increasingly become the norm, and new shifts like scanning your mobile device in-store to register for loyalty programs have been steadily rising as well. The foundational elements are set for a broader mobile shift, which could result in messaging apps playing bigger roles in transactions, in all forms. Could TikTok be the app to make that shift? Or will it be Elon Musk and his ‘Twitter 2.0’ vision?

Meta has since riveted to its focus on Metaverse and on the development of the next stage of connection. Maybe, there’s a chance that we could still see a major shift in consumer activity, in relation to social apps. The Information also notes that ByteDance has discussed plans to step up its eCommerce efforts in more countries this year, including Australia, Brazil, Spain, and the US.

The Wrap

TikTok is currently under fire in the US due to its potential connection to the Chinese Government, which has only been further reinforced by recent revelations about China-based investigators who have used TikTok data to effectively SPY on US Journalists. It’s not the easiest to see if this shift is indeed happening; if the numbers in China underline the potential, then you can bet that those figures will continue to inspire new efforts in Western social apps.

Sources

https://bit.ly/3W6e6jr