The short video platform has accelerated its expansion plans for Shop in the Americas after finding success in Southeast Asia.
As the source indicates, TikTok plans to expand its ecommerce business to the US and Brazil as it seeks new revenue streams and user growth. It is speculated that the social media platform seeks to grow its reach due to persistent political scrutiny over its ties to China.
The ByteDance-owned social media platfrom has posted more than 300 related jobs on LinkedIn over the past week, including positions for recommendation algorithm engineers, advertising merchant product managers, and heads of its household and make-up goods categories.
Company communications indicated that TikTok is looking for talent for its ecommerce operations team in the US. About 100 of the positions are based in Seattle, some of which require knowledge of fulfillment warehousing, parcel sorting, and courier delivery.
TikTok has also reportedly been planning to build its own product fulfilment centres in the US, according to an Axios report cited by South China Morning Post, which would give it control of another element of its e-commerce supply chain and open up another front in its challenge to Amazon.
TikTok Shop, a marketplace built into the TikTok app that facilitates transactions while users watch short videos and live streams, has already launched in the UK and six Southeast Asian countries, including Singapore and Indonesia. The Americas are next in the expansion plans as TikTok focuses more of its attention on the new service.
Although TikTok’s ecommerce business did not flourish as much outside Asia, the sources cited explain that in Asia, however, TikTok Shop has found some initial success. After expanding into Southeast Asia earlier this year, sales campaigns over the summer helped boost its profile. In August 2022, a week-long event in Singapore saw daily gross merchandise volume (GMV) triple compared with the previous week, a TikTok representative said at the time.
TikTok plans to continue running the campaigns through the end of 2022, according to the official TikTok Shop account on Tencent Holdings’ WeChat. If TikTok Shop launches in the US, it could also leverage increased consumer spending during the holiday season.
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