There’s a popular sentiment in the floundering video game industry right now: It doesn’t matter if you make a bad game or a good game. It doesn’t matter if your game makes money or doesn’t make money. Either way, in either case, you’re getting fired, not because you underperformed by any normal person’s standards, but because the corporate developer you worked for wants to rehire lower-paid staff for the next title, and cut costs in the interim.
That sounds an awful lot like what’s happening at TikTok Shop right now.
The ecommerce hub is the fastest-growing part of TikTok’s business. With it, ByteDance has finally managed to replicate a portion of the social shopping success it’s had with Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese sister app.
Subscribe for daily Tubefilter Top Stories
And though some sellers are anecdotally reporting that they’ve seen a drop in sales over the past couple weeks, TikTok Shop is still churning out billions of dollars in sales. Orca, an ecommerce startup focusing on helping digital content creators sell through TikTok Shop, has by itself sold over $100 million in the last 12 months.
But despite continued sales, TikTok is implementing yet another round of layoffs, cutting U.S.-based Shop staff for the third time in three months.
“As the TikTok Shop business evolves, we regularly review our operations to ensure long-term success,” a TikTok spokesperson told Bloomberg. “We’ve made the difficult decision to adjust parts of our team to better align with strategic priorities.”
TikTok wouldn’t say how many staffers were laid off, or at what level. Bloomberg reports that the layoffs are due to Shop falling short of internal sales targets, and says the company has been simultaneously replacing U.S.-hired staff near Seattle with managers in China.
TikTok hardly ever discusses things in hard numbers, so we’ll probably never know what TikTok Shop is actually selling vs what company execs expected it to sell.
What we do know is that all this is happening while TikTok is still on the ban chopping block. The Trump administration recently extended its stay-of-ban again and says a Stateside buyer has been approved, but is waiting for the Chinese government to give the OK. That uncertainty might be a contributing factor here, but from the outside, it looks like ByteDance is mostly trying to save a buck.
