What Does TikTok Shop LIVE Mean for Brands?

TikTok Shop LIVE has been a game changer for businesses, many of which have witnessed significant growth since having embraced the live shopping feature. With the right execution, there’s a genuine opportunity to make incredible sales in a relatively short time.

Merchants worldwide are recognising this fertile ground for revenue, and have begun the painstaking process of transforming their platforms to optimise for TikTok Shop LIVE. That’s meant leveraging its numerous features, including livestreams and in-feed videos, to get their products in front of the platform’s highly engaged audience. It’s been incredible to see the sheer range of sellers getting on board with TikTok Shop LIVE—not just multinational household names, but small homegrown businesses, too.

Next-level Discoverability

Eager to promote multiseller events, last year TikTok launched a series of live events for TikTok Shop. These were wildly successful, with its Summer Sale event alone garnering a staggering 276m live views and 135m views via associated hashtags. The interactive nature of live selling makes it perfect for pretty much every type of product. To consider just one creator as an example, consider Nisrin Kachar, who generated £10k of sales in a single session on one of TikTok Shop’s live events. After having incorporated TikTok Shop LIVE into her presence on the platform, Kachar grew her following from 260k to 480k in a matter of weeks.

“With more choice in online shopping than ever, people love the interaction of live selling. It feels like having a trusted friend cutting through the overwhelmingly endless options and saying, ‘You must try this.’ As a creator, that means the most important things are building trust and being authentic. That’s why I refuse to promote anything I don’t truly love.”

—Nisrin Kachar

Part of TikTok’s allure is the ease of its organic discoverability. A user’s content experience is precisely curated according to their interests, while being designed for novelty and exploration. That means anyone and any brand can be discovered if the search recommendation engine algorithms determine them to be of likely interest to the user—and that’s regardless of how many followers that creator or brand might have at the time.

What’s Next for TikTok Shop LIVE?

With an audience who are increasingly comfortable with shopping on social media platforms, TikTok is poised to capture those ready and willing to buy from their favourite brands and creators. TikTok Shop LIVE will be the nexus for the platform’s push into this area, and TikTok will continually roll out new features to improve the shopping experience and delight users. These new tools and features will streamline the running of livestream sales events, enabling brands and creators to better sell products while providing their audiences with enhanced buying experiences. Ultimately, TikTok’s vision is to become a one-stop shop where users can purchase trending items without even having to exit the platform at any point.

For those clients at my own marketing agency, Pixated, who are looking to make their mark on TikTok, I always remind them that the platform describes itself as ‘an entertainment platform first and foremost’. Your content mustn’t compromise on creativity for the sake of sales. Otherwise, users will quickly switch off and go elsewhere in search of those brands that are finding that balance more effectively.

Moreover, I advise my clients to continually innovate so they can adapt to the everchanging nature of the platform, giving their content plan a shakeup every few weeks and trying different approaches to see what resonates most with their audience. For some it can be daunting to try establishing themselves on a new platform, but the rewards are unequivocal for those who take the leap and land it with finesse. As with any new channel, there’s testing and learning to be done when it comes to TikTok Shop LIVE—but as long as merchants stay agile in their mindset and flexible in their approach, they should soon discover what works for their brand and how to achieve success on the platform.