Key Highlights
- TikTok is hunting for collaborators to launch its live shopping offering in the United States as it is looking to outsource operations for these features.
- As per the report from Financial Times, the short video app has been in talks with California-based TalkShopLive to offer infrastructure for live shopping features on TikTok.
- This technology will permit creators and brands to sell goods through videos on the platform.
TalkShopLive takes a 10% commission from sellers for offering its services, and TikTok is likely to cover that cost for the starting phase of the project.
The report noted that TikTok and TalkShopLive, which raised $6 million in a seed extension round last year, have not finalized any terms. So there is little info about when the shopping feature will go live.
TikTok started offering ecommerce features the previous year by collaborating with Shopify to let business accounts integrate their catalogs to a dedicated tab on their profiles. The company gave tools to brands to create, run, and monitor ad campaigns on the platform. TikTok also started testing a dedicated Shop feed in June to highlight products sold by merchants on the app.
Since last year, the company has been testing its live shopping product in the UK which is its first market outside Asia to test this feature. However, the project failed to meet the company’s expectations, reconsidering live shopping expansion in other countries such as the US and Germany.
TikTok had not commented on the specifics of the collaborations the company is looking for to expand its live commerce offerings.
Live shopping has not taken off in North America as predicted. Initially, Facebook started testing it in 2018, but last month it announced that the company is shutting down this feature to focus on Reels.
Amazon also experimented with QVC-styled live streams from influencers before its Amazon Prime Day sales in July but did not provide any numbers about how much revenue it could generate from these live videos.
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