Sellers are free! TikTok wants to challenge Amazon in the United States

TikTok is following Temu's example to launch its e-commerce business in the United States , and has promised merchants that the platform will provide all services to sellers free of charge , without charging any fees, including delivery, warehousing and even commissions!

Industry insiders speculate that this strategy could disrupt the low-price e-commerce market currently dominated by Temu, and may even challenge Amazon's position in the future.

TikTok will attract more sellers by handling everything from marketing to logistics and invoicing , a sales manager at Bytedance said in a live broadcast. It is envisioned that merchants only need to submit product information and ship the goods to a warehouse in Guangzhou, and TikTok will take care of the rest.

Compared with other competitors, TikTok's advantage is that it has been installed on 150 million devices in the United States and occupies an increasing amount of mobile users' time.

Currently, TikTok has launched mature shopping features in sites such as the UK and Saudi Arabia, and this "fully hosted" model will be officially launched in North America in the coming months.

Data shows that TikTok's e-commerce business is growing four times a year and is expected to reach a gross merchandise value of US$20 billion by the end of this year.

Much of the growth was driven by TikTok’s several Southeast Asian sites, where its combination of online entertainment and in-app shopping has yielded unexpected results.

Although choosing to compete with Temu and Amazon in the United States is a promising path, it will definitely be full of difficulties.

Two people familiar with the matter said the company hopes to bring TikTok Shop to U.S. users, but TikTok has recently been trying to launch a "centralized" shopping platform in the United States.

They said this was both because smartphone users in Western markets were not used to the concept of content shopping and because TikTok had learned lessons from Temu.

To differentiate TikTok’s service, ByteDance’s sales staff also said they would not force merchants to sell at a loss.

“Some rival platforms just want low prices, is that a good thing?” one of them said in a Douyin livestream on June 27. “We don’t lack traffic, we lack good products and suppliers.”

This statement is obviously aimed at Temu. However, although the platform policy is very friendly to sellers, how TikTok's full hosting model will develop in the future still depends on consumer feedback.

TikTok

USA

E-commerce