TikTok Shop is an

e-commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) refers to commercial activities including the electronic buying or selling products and services which are conducted on online platforms or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile co ...

feature of the video hosting service

TikTok TikTok, known in mainland China and Hong Kong as Douyin (), is a social media and Short-form content, short-form online video platform owned by Chinese Internet company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which may range in duration f ...

. Officially launched in September 2023, the feature enables users interested in starting a business and generating income to upload their curated products on TikTok for others to discover and purchase. Daily sales averaged approximately in October 2023.

History

In October 2019, TikTok announced its partnership with

Shopify Shopify Inc., stylized as ''shopify'', headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, operates an e-commerce platform for retail point-of-sale systems that offers payments, marketing, shipping, inventory management, transaction management, and customer eng ...

for a feature called ''TikTok: For Business''. In November 2022,

ByteDance ByteDance Ltd. is a Chinese internet technology company headquartered in Haidian, Beijing, and incorporated in the Cayman Islands. Founded by Zhang Yiming, Liang Rubo, and a team of others in 2012, ByteDance developed the video-sharing ap ...

commenced beta testing of the platform in the United Kingdom and several Southeast Asian countries. In December 2022, Amazon announced the release of '' Amazon Inspire'', a platform resembling TikTok Shop, in a bid to compete with TikTok itself. In September 2023, ByteDance announced the launch of TikTok Shop globally, which was notably influenced by the launch of ''Amazon Inspire''.

Criticism and controversies

Since its launch, TikTok Shop has encountered issues related to

misinformation Misinformation is incorrect or misleading information. Misinformation and disinformation are not interchangeable terms: misinformation can exist with or without specific malicious intent, whereas disinformation is distinct in that the information ...

about products, reviews made by

generative artificial intelligence Generative artificial intelligence (Generative AI, GenAI, or GAI) is a subfield of artificial intelligence that uses generative models to produce text, images, videos, or other forms of data. These models Machine learning, learn the underlyin ...

to promote certain products,

review bomb A review bomb is a malicious Internet phenomenon in which a large number of people or Sock puppet account, a few people with multiple accounts post negative user reviews online in an attempt to harm the sales or popularity of a product, a service, ...

s, and instances of

scam A scam, or a confidence trick, is an attempt to defraud a person or group after first gaining their Trust (emotion), trust. Confidence tricks exploit victims using a combination of the victim's credulity, naivety, compassion, vanity, confidence ...

ming.

References

{{TikTok navbox TikTok E-commerce 2022 establishments ByteDance