TikTok Shop | Hacker News Reader

TikTok Shop

newsroom.tiktok.com

31 pointsmfiguiere53 comments

That's pretty insane that TikTok will also do fulfillment! That has to be a major differentiating feature from all of the other social media companies right? I would be very surprised if Meta or Google did anything close to that when it comes to shopping.

Not hard to imagine a new generation of shops that are exclusively on TikTok and don't even use Shopify or some other e-commerce stack.

China in general seems to really like the concept of superapps, so it coming out into the physical domain seems like the next logical step.

Interesting take on why super-apps continuously fail in the west: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G6RDzPadLQ

Asians are already using TikTok Shop like crazy to sell reps (replica merch). I get dozens of live feeds which are clearly being made by the factories themselves to sell their knock-off Guccis etc.

Honestly, every time I get on TikTok, it degenerates into thirst traps and OF adverts. I explicitly block these creators and never click like in any of these themes, but the algorithm thinks I want to see that stuff no matter how much I try to tell it that I don’t.

My feed is entirely cooking tiktoks, pottery and restaurant recs for the town I live in. I am fairly ruthless about indicating when I am (like/bookmark) and am not interested (block and hit "not interested" button) in a piece of content.

My fyp is mostly Scott Pilgrim clips and bladerunner2049-esque photography, which is weird because I've never seen Scott Pilgrim vs The World or either Blade Runner. Sure there's occasional dance memes just like there's also random pranks and animated memes which I'm sure everyone sees, but like, the algorithm clearly knows what I like somehow, because I ended up really liking both of those movies after being encouraged to watch them by my fyp.

There is a saying in TikTok, “you are responsible for your own timeline.”

Prove it?

I do not give the benefit of doubt to large corporations, especially those backed by governments. I save that for individuals.

This is impossible without working at TikTok, and being intimately aware of their algorithm, neither of which I am. But I would lend credence to this saying because it seems to be so obvious to the users of the platform. They learn quite a lot about how it works through observation alone.

Agreed, without working there, you're just speculating.

Given the possiblity for abuse, and the value from abusing it, I assume the worst: they are abusing it and probably worse than either of us can imagine.

Apologies for the lack of civility, but anyone who says that without irony is an idiot. Why? Because they are granting legitimacy to a multinational over the words of actual people.

Claiming that "the algorithm is always right and therefore you must be lying" is as close as thoughtcrime as one can get. When in doubt (and I see no evidence here), side with the human and not with the algorithm!

The enshittification of tiktok is almost complete. The famed recommendation algorithm that would figure out and show you want is there but it doesn't generate money. At this point, it is the exploitation phase of the users.

The only element I'm aware of that you didn't mention is quickly swiping away from thirst traps- TikTok counts how much time you spend watching that video as a signal.

Other than that, if you're representing your use correctly, it sounds like a bug, or that someone else is using your account (on a shared device?) to watch the sexy people.

Already huge in Thailand (at least going by my gf's purchasing habits). Didn't realize it wasn't already a thing in the US

It's actually been live in the USA for months as far as I'm aware. They've been spending god knows how many millions giving out free coupons and discount coupons. I see hundreds of people making huge bank at the moment off this. I was even making content for it last night.

what are ppl buying feom there? is it 100% useless junk and clothes with 99% margin?

Everything. It is basically treated like Amazon. Why search "dog beds" on a shopping platform when you can search it on TikTok and see videos from people with real dogs on the beds. But also yes probably mostly clothes

>with real dogs

Its tiktok, what makes you so sure those arent vloggers on all fours with a filter?

What makes you think I'm not into that?

Lot of replica designer merch from Asia is what I've been seeing the last few months. There are some great genuine products on there from smaller sellers though.

There’s a lot of health and beauty supplements.

Is TikTok trying to become Musk's vision for X? Social media, music, shopping, I sense a finance branch is soon to follow...

No, TikTok is just bringing the features from Chinese platforms to the west. And so does Elon too.

Isn't the parent company of TikTok Chinese ? If so, wouldn't it make the business model the natural progression ?

Yes, TikTok was created by the Chinese company Bytedance, by merging their own app with another Chinese app which was popular in the USA. But I'm not sure whether it could be called natural progression just because of its origin. It's a natural direction of progress for all social media-services. I mean home shopping-TV and sellout-parties with your friends and neighbors are quite common in USA too. And this is just a version of this for the digital space, in which Chinese apps have more experience and success at the moment.

Yes, ByteDance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ByteDance

Tech companies need to move into new markets to keep growing revenue streams. Seems only logical.

Both are inspired by WeChat.

Instagram already has shopping, messaging, social media etc. I think this is more just getting parity to existing competitors.

How come people are coming up to this erroneous conclusion?

Twitter has no chance, it's too politized, it doesn't attract the youth

Is it because the press likes to demonize TikTok so people never heard of WeChat?

Musk literally said he wants to copy WeChat

https://streamable.com/m7c2hh

I'm very aware that he is literally trying to copy WeChat, my comment was quite facetious but that is probably lost through text.

I'm curious how the logistics around shipping will play out for them.

IIRC, Amazon shipping was bottlenecked by UPS/USPS/FedEx. So, Amazon got more ambitious, developed a delivery fleet themselves, and started handling the last mile themselves.

Is this what TikTok is planning to do, too? If not, what are their other options? If so, I don't feel that TikTok having a successful shopping experience outside of the US is indicative of success within. They can probably handle a lot of the shopping experience, but it seems insane to me that they could just casually pop-up and handle the last mile overnight.

Not surprised to see them do commerce, but the scale of this is surprising. It’s an ambitious entry: Includes pick & pack fulfillment, even.

In the UK, I've seen a fair amount to TikTok shop fads pass on my For You Page already, mostly seem to be things like cleaning products or some clothing stuff.

I could see the model being moderately effective as an advertising method, they tend to look more "organic" than professional adverts, which might make people think they're more authentic.

For comparison, Amazon has been doing in-video shopping for some time, [1] although the result feels to me more like a panoply of cable television home shopping networks, than organic social discovery platform.

[1]: http://amazon.com/live

And Aliexpress mobile app has something simmilar too; tiktok-like videos that you scroll through and they promote their products

Are they going to be able to pull it off? Many companies have tried over the years and eventually threw in the towel.

They already launched this in some SEA countries and people seem to be ordering a lot on tiktok already.

I'm always curious on new takes - I wonder who they have partnered with on all the back end integrations.

A 22.5meg .png image on that page. How?

> A 22.5meg .png image on that page. How?

The page in total is like 36 MB: https://gtmetrix.com/reports/newsroom.tiktok.com/ZezM7two/

I don't think I've ever seen a page that large, outside of streaming videos and such. What an interesting time, especially because this could have been avoided by downscaling two images to fit the actual plausible display sizes.

A 11208 × 7072 picture ! There another one of similar size (but of "only" 10+ MB)

I was on a site owned by Lyft the other day and I couldn't understand why the page was taking so long to load, I thought my connection was fried. Then I looked at the size of the images. All the images are 20MB+ each, even the thumbnails:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230602185543/https://divvybike...

This is genius, but distresses me. I can see this being a huge success for TikTok.

I don't have an account and never will, but there's almost a guaranteed slam dunk for them here.

same. it feels like QVC for generation z

Its super big in SEA region already.

What is the SEA region?

Edit: thank you to those replies.

South East Asia.

They assumed that if it works in China, it will work in the US as well.

I don't know if anyone needs to assume selling things would work in the US market to be fair..

Late stage capitalism via China. Didn’t see that one coming.

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