TikTok Shop wants U.S. sellers to learn from Asia’s booming ecommerce market

How can U.S.-based TikTok Shop sellers maximize their profits? The ByteDance-owned platform has some ideas, but its community might not be buying them.

TikTok hosted Shop partners at its Culver City headquarters (pictured above) for an ecommerce event that took place approximately one year after TikTok Shop’s official U.S. launch. According to Business Insider, the attendees — who represented 200 agencies — participated in panels, brainstorming sessions, and conversations with TikTok staffers.

Though the summit ranged between several discussion topics, attendees noticed a clear theme. “Probably 60% to 70% of the discussion was around live stream,” Trndsttrs founder Jake Bjorseth told Business Insider.

TikTok has good reason to focus on live shopping. That’s one the principal formats driving the $18 trillion ecommerce industry, and Asia accounts for more than half of that market on its own. TikTok’s Chinese counterpart, Douyin, is one of the most popular vehicles for Asian ecommerce, with its shoppable streams contributing to ByteDance’s $25 billion profit in 2022.

To translate Douyin’s ecommerce empire across the Pacific, TikTok used its Culver City summit to discuss topics like studio space and the other necessary building blocks of a live shopping empire. The platform is backing up that talk by establishing Stateside live shopping studios and using promotions to drive consumers to its shoppable streams.

Those efforts are helpful, and TikTok Shop’s U.S. community has grown to include more than 500,000 sellers

. But the summit attendees who spoke to Business Insider expressed skepticism about the potential of Chinese-style live shopping streams on the U.S. version of TikTok Shop. Many Western sellers who have found success on the platform have done so through on-demand videos rather than streams, and there are questions about how much interest American buyers have in live shopping.

The disconnect between TikTok and its community regarding live shopping is part of a larger cultural clash that has hampered ByteDance’s ability to expand its ecommerce empire outside of Asia. TikTok Shop’s American rollout led to a mix of excitement and laments, and based on the reactions to the Culver City summit, TikTok is still struggling to convince sellers that they can apply lessons from countries like China and Indonesia to their operations.

But on the whole, Americans are starting to become amenable to live shopping. Social commerce will be a $100 billion business in the U.S. by 2025, according to eMarketer, and SoCom is about to blast off as the first U.S. conference dedicated to social shopping. This holiday season, Gen Z is expected to buy more stuff through TikTok, and the app wants to make sure that its agency partners can meet consumers where they are.