Social platforms like Instagram, TikTok or Twitter are known for exploring all possible ways to monetize their content. All of these platforms rely on advertising, with some of them offering paid features to "enhance" themselves. Now she appeared on the air informace, that TikTok intends to experiment with another monetization strategy, luckily for us only in the US so far. It could soon come with a feature called TikTok Shop, which would allow users to buy products directly from the app while watching a live stream.
TikTok Shop is actually nothing new for the globally popular social network for creating and sharing short videos. It is already available under sister app Douyin, operating in China. The live shopping feature is available in Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and also in the UK. According to the website of the Financial Times, out of nine million e-commerce streams, Douyin has sold 2021 billion products between May 10 and this year.
Technologically, the function should be provided in the USA by the company TalkShopLive. At the moment, negotiations are said to be ongoing between the partners and no documents or agreements have been signed yet. If they do, it will be the feature's first expansion outside of Asian markets (unless we count the UK experiment).
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TikTok reportedly planned to expand the TikTok Shop across Europe this year. However, according to insiders, he backed away from this plan because there was not as much interest in the test feature as expected in the UK. If it does eventually launch in the US, the question is whether the platform plans to make any local market-specific changes to it to avoid a UK setback.
