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Snail facial serum with gold flakes for $3.20, a litter box for $2.34, and candles shaped and scented like Starbucks Frappuccinos for $5.63. You might not have it on your holiday wish list, but you can find it on TikTok Shop, which is already discounting hard ahead of Black Friday.
TikTok Shop’s Black Friday deals began in late October. And there’s a bewildering range of products with steep markdowns. You can get 50 percent off beauty products, coupons offering 15, 20, and 25 percent off orders, and 30-percent-off coupons with no minimum spend for first-time shoppers. The app’s 200,000 sellers can also pick items to be discounted on the shop, creating their own markdowns, which can be further subsidized by TikTok’s discounts.
While the Black Friday sales at other major retailers will be awash with big-name brands, on TikTok Shop, it’s a real mix. Larger, established retailers are muddled in with indistinguishable, third-party sellers hawking brand name beauty products and housewares. There are “crunchcups,” or to-go tumblers that hold cereal and milk separately, a tiny wall safe disguised as a light switch, an “anti-anxiety” necklace, and an umbrella for a dog.
These odds and ends all come from sellers looking to break through and make a buck on Black Friday. And they have the chance to win big: Small businesses can see a flood of interest overnight if their products take off. TikTok is attempting to do what other social apps have tried and failed: make a splash in social shopping, just in time for the holiday season.
For smaller sellers, it’s TikTok's greatest asset—the way it connects people to products—that can be a blessing and a curse. If an item goes viral, it creates unprecedented demand. Paul Jauregui, who cofounded BK Beauty with his wife Lisa, says TikTok Shop’s model perfectly fits with their cosmetics brand: Lisa got her start on YouTube with makeup tutorials, and they’ve relied on social media marketing to find customers.
But BK Beauty’s brushes are doing almost too well. Between TikTok Shop launching and mid-November, the company has sold more than 30,000 brushes. Jauregui says that has nearly tripled their business. “As demand starts to really take off, it has put a lot of pressure on our inventory,” he says. “It’s a good problem to have, but at the end of the day, it’s a problem.” Jauregui says BK Beauty discounted the brushes, but TikTok Shop further subsidizes the prices, leading to those steep markdowns people see. TikTok did not provide a number when asked how much of sellers’ prices it is subsidizing.
Those low prices may lure people in for now, but they’re not likely to stick around. “This kind of deep discounting, it’s not sustainable,” says Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst of social media for market research firm Insider Intelligence. But it allows TikTok to swiftly gain shoppers and sellers.
This is a pivotal moment for their shops, but also for TikTok. When TikTok Shop launched in the US in September, it seemed to be a play to rival Amazon, offering to store and ship items for its third-party sellers. But in reality, TikTok Shop is more like Temu or Shein. And its performance this Black Friday will be a key measure of its early success.
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As it subsidizes deep discounts and bets big on the power of its army of influencers to get products in front of shoppers, TikTok needs to do well this holiday season to prove it can be a major player. That also means showing it’s more than a social app. “It’s really not just a commerce story,” says Enberg. “It’s this story of TikTok trying to build itself into a digital juggernaut.”
TikTok Shop has some major retailers on board, like PacSun and Revolve, but with lingering fears that TikTok will be banned in the US or forced to sell, it could be less appealing for larger companies. Because TikTok’s algorithm can lead a random product into the limelight, smaller unknown or unbranded products that do something novel or better than a mainstream one could be its strength. “They can go viral,” says Ivy Yang, a columnist who formerly worked for Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba.
TikTok Shop falls under the social shopping category, something Instagram and Facebook have tried and failed at. Social and live shopping is huge in Asia—in China alone, live shopping is expected to drive nearly 20 percent of online shopping this year, according to market research firm Insider Intelligence.
It’s a trend that’s set apart from traditional ecommerce. Social shopping is driven more by discovery, with creators promoting products in videos. But shopping at Amazon is driven by utility; people go looking for products they know they need rather than scroll and happen upon them. Social shopping is the social media equivalent of TV shopping.
The early days of TikTok Shop in the US were plagued with concerns about counterfeit items. And just weeks after it launched in the US, TikTok Shop closed in Indonesia, following a countrywide ban on social media apps from competing in ecommerce. It was a move intended to boost local merchants and shield customers from having their data used to persuade them to buy things—but some local merchants say social shopping had become a key part of their business. It’s still available in Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and the UK.
