TikTok Shop buoys prospects for live-shopping landscape

“We’ll do it live.”

It’s the direction some shoppers went this holiday shopping season after TikTok Shop was introduced in September. And as Retail Brew previously reported, the platform, which currently generates a $3 billion run rate in the United States, has room to become increasingly more successful.

CommentSold, a live-shopping e-commerce platform, sees this as good news since it inked a partnership with the social media platform in August that integrates its live-selling platform into TikTok Shop. Now, CommentSold’s merchants can host live shopping events on TikTok from CommentSold’s platform.

But Dan Dan Li, chief innovation officer at CommentSold, said TikTok Shops’s foray into the live-shopping ecosystem is not only good for the platform, but also live shopping broadly—a market that’s projected to reach $67.8 billion by 2026, according to Coresight Research.

• CommentSold’s entry into DTC e-commerce started days after its partnership with TikTok and after the company acquired mobile live-streaming marketplace Popshoplive.

“Especially after TikTok coming to the space, I think all of the businesses in the live streaming space…have to also adjust themselves,” Li told Retail Brew.

Give it a try: Li said over the holidays, CommentSold, with the help of TikTok and Popshoplive, saw increasing demand from not only buyers but sellers wanting to expand their live-shopping channels. Ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, TikTok Shop had more than 200,000 sellers and the #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt hashtag exceeded 77 billion views, per CNBC.

• However, Li explained that TikTok Shop and CommentSold mostly attract small to medium-sized businesses and sellers.
• She said these platforms don’t attract as many large sellers because they’re used to using software like Shopify where they have more visibility and control over the data they want to see. Also, Li said many larger brands simply haven’t adopted robust marketplace or social media strategies.

“[Bigger brands are] doing very successfully using traditional e-commerce or in combination with ads.” she said. That being said, smaller brands—even mom-and-pop shops—on CommentSold are bringing in as much as $50 million a year, and need to rely less on purchasing ad spots, Li added.

“You can pretty much have everything in livestreaming—you have the conversion, you have the customer relationship building, and you’re also creating a brand at the same time,” she said.

Zoom out: Earlier this month, TikTok Shop told its sellers it would be raising commission from 2% to 8% while also charging 30 cents per transaction. The hike will be gradual and be fully implemented by July. While she anticipates some pushback from sellers, Li explained that the 2% commission rate was already a bargain by industry standards.

“It’s indicative of the progress of the TikTok Shop,” she said. “I think they probably feel like it’s a good place for them to have enough good examples on the platform and also good traction on…converting their users into customers.”