Despite its audience success – it has already exceeded 1,000 million users – and the viral power of many of its contents, not everything is triumphant on TikTok. At least that is what the fact of that TikTok is unraveling its business plans in Europeparallel to what is happening in the United States.
Online shopping events streamed from TikTok by influencers are not having the expected success
Some of these plans that are now being ruled out have been the subject of pilot tests in some countries, as has happened in the United Kingdom with live broadcasts via streaming of commercial content under the “On Trend” event that have resulted in few audiences. They also failed to boost sales and even some of the tiktokers involved in said events have withdrawn from said commercial actions due to low audiences.
In the meantime, TikTok had planned the launch of Shop, its online sales platform in countries such as Germany, Spain, France and Italy, before reaching the United States throughout the next year 2023, but now those plans have been cancelled. At the moment, the social platform is concentrating on achieving the success of these attempts in the United Kingdom while reinforcing its development in Asia, where the concept has reached a greater degree of maturity in different markets in the area.
There, online shopping events led by influencers are a success for ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok. In China, precisely the local version of the platform, Douyin, has managed to turn these commercial events into authentic public and sales successes to the satisfaction of brands, advertisers, sales and the content creators themselves.
TikTok is not the only platform interested in turning online sales through streaming into great social and commercial phenomena. Amazon, Instagram or YouTube have also started their attempts in this area with mixed success. The first, to achieve this, for the moment reinforces its business day par excellence, Prime Day, which this year will be held on July 12 and 13 while rumors sound that there could be a second Prime Day in the fall.
