The Financial Times reported that TikTok is scaling back its plans for live commerce in Europe and the United States after early service launches haven’t been successful, a trend that appears to be affecting the company.
While TikTok seems like an unstoppable global entertainment giant, at least one section of its offering isn’t entirely taking over.
Since last year, TikTok has been testing live shopping in the UK, starting with a multi-brand event called “On Trend.” However, those live streams haven’t drawn big audiences or sparked many sales, and the creators involved in early TikTok Shop projects have dropped out.
Originally, TikTok had planned to launch Shop in Germany, France, Italy, and Spain by now, and in the US later this year, but it is now focusing solely on making the product a success in the UK. There are also several countries in Asia where the concept is more widespread.
For TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, live online shopping is a huge business. Similarly, Douyin— the Chinese version of TikTok, has seen live sales become huge cultural events that bring big business to retailers, creators, and platforms.
However, there’s not much evidence that live e-commerce will work everywhere; so far, there’s no solid evidence to suggest it will. QVC and the Home Shopping Network have become very popular in the past few years in the United States.
More and more users are buying products through Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. However, not a single platform has succeeded in bringing live shopping to the masses, despite many platforms trying to provide live shopping services. Shopping streams even have Amazon invested heavily! Aside from that, as social shopping continues to expand across the globe, there is going to be intense competition to be the place where this shopping takes place.
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