TikTok Shopping launched with new social commerce features

TikTok Shopping comes on the heels of the platform reaching more than 1 billion monthly active users

TikTok is expanding its investment in e-commerce. Earlier this year, the video platform began piloting TikTok Shopping in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, in partnership with Shopify.

The deal allowed Shopify merchants with a TikTok For Business account to add a Shopping tab to their TikTok profiles and sync their product catalogues to the app to create mini-storefronts.

Now, TikTok is announcing a range of new brand partners for TikTok Shopping, including Square, Ecwid and PrestaShop, with Wix, SHOPLINE, OpenCart and BASE coming soon. It also introduced a fuller range of solutions for TikTok commerce, including ad products and later this year, a TikTok Shopping API.

The new suite of solutions has been 18 months in the making as TikTok has been striving to make its platform more conducive to convenient and effective ecommerce. During that time, TikTok examined what commerce on its platform would look like through partnerships with Levi Strauss & Co. and Walmart Inc. as well as through pilot programs in Europe via Spotify.

TikTok Shopping comes on the heels of the platform reaching more than 1 billion monthly active users (MAU) as of September 27, 2021. Prior to TikTok Shopping, the platform’s organic, word-of-mouth style of content inspired shopping as opposed to providing a place to do it–creators discussed products in their videos and viewers responded by purchasing them wherever they could.

For example, the hashtag #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt has 5.4 billion views and strengthened TikTok’s commitment to adapting its platform to the future of social commerce. The new features effectively cut out the middleman and streamline the process of discovering and shopping for brands, creators and users.