Sweeping the United States! More than 90% of Americans flock to this new platform this year

In 2022, Tik Tok Shop opened sites in the UK, Southeast Asia and other places, and the transaction volume soared rapidly. In November, Tik Tok Shop landed in the United States. This huge and mature e-commerce consumer market is very enthusiastic about Tik Tok. According to a survey, more than 90% of small businesses in the United States will open stores on Tik Tok in 2023, and most consumers said they would shop on Tik Tok. This will be one of the fastest-growing platforms in the United States this year.

At present, Amazon is still the strongest in the e-commerce field, but with the pursuit of latecomers such as Temu and TikTok Shop, its market share will gradually disappear. Can Amazon still maintain its transcendent big brother status?

In 2023, a large number of American merchants will enter Tik Tok Shop

According to the latest data released by Apptopia, the most downloaded application in the world in 2022 is Tik Tok, with 672 million downloads; Tik Tok also topped the list of the most downloaded applications in the United States, with 99 million downloads.

The number of users is rising rapidly, and the overseas expansion of Tik Tok Shop, the overseas version of Douyin Store , has also attracted much attention. This will become a new way for cross-border sellers to go overseas.

According to foreign media reports, in order to analyze people's views on Tik Tok, Circuit surveyed more than 1,300 consumers and business owners in the United States and found that most people plan to use TikTok Shop for online buying and selling in 2023 and believe that it will eventually surpass Amazon's e-commerce empire.

Specifically, 92% of small business owners surveyed plan to incorporate Tik Tok into their marketing strategy in 2023, and 79% of consumers believe that TikTok Shop will steal Amazon's business. In addition, 78% of consumers plan to use TikTok Shop for holiday shopping this year and say they are willing to spend an average of $12 per month on a premium membership similar to Amazon.

Most brands ( 87%) believe that TikTok Shop will have a positive impact on their business. Medium-sized businesses are 19% more likely than small businesses to believe that TikTok Shop will have a positive impact on their business, 5% more likely to include TikTok Shop in their marketing plans, and are willing to invest 69% of their own funds in marketing budgets.

In terms of consumer group distribution, among all generations surveyed, Generation Z is expected to use TikTok Shop the most, and baby boomers are expected to use it the least for online shopping.

In November 2022, Tik Tok Shop officially opened the application channel for entering the US site, launching an attack on the huge US market. Like the domestic Douyin store, Shop allows users to browse products and complete purchases without leaving Tik Tok. Qualified US brands can sell products through information flow videos, live videos and product display tags.

Potential sellers flocked to the market, all eyeing the new market entry of small American shops.

It is understood that the US store is currently only open to local users. To register a US store, you need to use a US mobile phone number + email address, or register with an existing TikTok account, and the merchant needs to get an invitation code. If it is a corporate registration, you need to show the US company license and the passport/driver's license of the person in charge. If you register as an individual, you only need to show the US passport/driver's license.

There is no fee to apply for a TikTok store, but TikTok will charge a commission from each transaction. "Under normal circumstances, the sales commission for each product is 5%. However, in the first 90 days after the seller successfully registers, the commission will drop to 1.8%, and will return to 5% after 90 days," TikTok said.

Soon after the launch, some big sellers in China received invitations from small American stores to join and enter the internal testing phase.

The appeal of small stores in the United States is self-evident. As of July 2022, the United States has more than 140 million TikTok users, making it the market with the largest number of TikTok users, and shopping on Tik Tok is becoming more and more common. It is predicted that in 2022, 27.3% of American Tik Tok users will place orders on the app, and by 2023, this proportion will increase to 37%, an increase of nearly 10 million people, with huge potential.

Cross-border sales rush layout

Many sellers in the industry are paying attention to the Tik Tok platform. Huakai Yibai has gradually begun to open a small number of accounts on Tik Tok, but current sales are still relatively small.

In the process of opening up overseas markets, Tik Tok Shop first opened up the UK market, and then started cross-border business in four Southeast Asian countries (Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines) . Judging from the sales data, the early online sites have been very successful.

According to official data, from January 2 to December 13 , 2022 , TikTok conducted more than 2.86 million live broadcasts, with a total live broadcast duration of more than 160 million hours, and consumers and merchants interacted more than 8 billion times in total.

During this period, 66% of users felt that TikTok helped them make purchasing decisions, and 67% of users felt that TikTok prompted them to make new purchasing decisions. More than 2.43 million cross-border e-commerce short videos generated GMV conversion. Apparel, shoes and bags, fast-moving consumer goods and beauty, 3C digital, home life, jewelry and crystal, and sports and outdoor became the six major categories of TikTok Shop.

Tik Tok needs players with e-commerce genes. In terms of qualification certification in the Tik Tok store entry process , in addition to company qualifications and legal person qualifications, sellers must also provide three-party qualifications: that is, sellers must have at least one mainstream cross-border or domestic e-commerce platform operation experience , the store must reach DSR (store rating) or a favorable review rate ≥ 4.5 or 95% , and upload the main store background screenshots and main store links .

With the support of surging traffic , Tik Tok has high hopes for its e-commerce business. According to people familiar with the matter, TikTok's e-commerce business GMV target for 2022 is US$2 billion, more than half of which has been completed in the first half of the year. Its e-commerce GMV target for 2023 is US$23 billion, more than 10 times the previous year.

The strong spending power of the US market will enable it to quickly approach this goal. According to the "2022 US E-Commerce Forecast" report released by eMarketer, despite the challenges of high inflation and declining consumption around the world, US e-commerce sales are still expected to exceed the $1 trillion mark in 2022, a year-on-year increase of 9.4%.

The United States is Amazon's home turf, and even in Southeast Asia, where it is not very popular, Tik Tok Shop has achieved a successful start. The popularity of video sales has made Amazon feel a sense of crisis, and its investment in live streaming has continued to increase.

Last December, Amazon began to launch "Inspire", which was commented by the outside world as "a shopping service similar to TikTok". It consists of short videos and photos, where consumers can explore products and ideas, and shop from content created by Internet celebrities, brands and other customers.

Among many e-commerce platforms, Amazon has a large user base and mature platform rules, making it almost a must-have platform for cross-border sellers. However, as the platform's internal competition intensifies and advertising and storage costs increase, platform sellers are quite dissatisfied. At this time, if a new platform with great potential emerges, they don't mind giving it a try. Temu is a ready-made example.

It can be predicted that in the e-commerce market in 2023, there will be a fierce collision between traditional e-commerce and social media e-commerce, which may be a feast for the cross-border e-commerce industry.

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