TikTok reportedly plans to take home shopping into the livestream era with a new partnership.
According to the Financial Times, TikTok is partnering with live shopping platform TalkShopLive to enable users to buy products directly from livestreams. This past July, TikTok experimented with live shopping in the U.K. using an in-house feature called TikTok Shop. But the experiment was dropped due to “internal problems and struggled to gain traction with consumers,” the FT reported.
Now, TikTok is reportedly trying live shopping again; this time, outsourcing it to the platform that has been used by celebrities like Matthew McConaughey and Dolly Parton to hawk their products. According to a source “familiar with the plans” the feature is expected to launch next month, just in time for the lucrative holiday season.
TalkShopLive essentially takes QVC’s home shopping model online. Sellers create a channel and add products that they want to sell. When sellers go live, products appear in a sidebar next to the livestream, which buyers can then add to their cart and check out all within the platform. TalkShopLive takes a 10 percent commission of all product sales. This technology will be integrated into TikTok so that it works on TikTok Live. The same insider source says TikTok will initially cover the commission that TalkShopLive would make.
Last year alone, TikTok made $4.6 billion in revenue from a combination of ad sales and in-app purchases of “coins.” Most of that revenue comes from advertising, but with this new partnership, TikTok might be selling a lot more than digital coins.
