TikTok’s 2023-launched Shop (US, UK and Southeast Asia) offers four options, enabling product discovery, checkout and delivery in-app: a Shop tab multi-brand marketplace, live shopping (aka LIVES), prerecorded Shoppable Videos, and a brand’s own Product Showcase. Brand leaders and tech consultants discussed the merchandising tools, luxury zones and an Amazon Prime Day copycat, conceived to build on 2023 sales of $20bn globally.

While livestream shopping via social media remains most popular in Asia – 81% of Chinese consumers have purchased from a livestream broadcast (Statista, 2023) – Navarra posited TikTok Shop’s Lives as a catalyst for growth in other regions. After a false start in 2021, Lives are already proving successful for brands, while TikTok’s QVC-esque Los Angeles-based studio will open imminently. Elsewhere, YouTube’s shoppable Shorts deliver engagement.

As commerce on social media platforms scales up, speakers highlighted how connecting with customers in more personal ways will matter for brand engagement – but also, crucially, for customer service. New tools for one-to-one in-app dialogue, AI-powered personal shoppers and TikTok’s sociability ambitions were all flagged as areas to watch, alongside TikTok Lives’ feedback power.

The power of using smaller-scale content creators who connect authentically with a target audience was noted by several speakers. Nano-creators – those deemed to have a following of less than 10,000 – were cited as offering both trust and impressive conversion rates, while fan-powered commerce, based on user-generated content (UGC) advocacy, continues to be effective.