TikTok shopping, what is it?

Social selling is the ability to use social networks to find customers for your brand, company or products. This art allows us to interact with our clients, to understand them and, above all, to support them in meeting their needs. It’s just a way for companies to connect with their prospects and make sure they always go to them for the products that are being marketed.

Until a few months ago, only Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat gave the possibility to do social selling. 

But since August 2021, as a result of its collaboration with Shopify, Tiktok has joined this social selling group with TikTok Shopping. If you are a product brand promoter, find out in this article how to use TikTok Shopping to promote your different products. 

TikTok in France and worldwide

Tiktok is known by many Internet users as a social network for sharing short videos of all types. 

Created in September 2016 by the Chinese company ByteDance, the social network has continued to grow its fanbase. It now has nearly 800 million users worldwide and more than a billion visitors every month.

TikTok in France 

As of July 2020, more than 14.9 million people use TikTok in France each month, according to network statistics. In 2019, it was 4.4 million people. So there was a strong increase in French users, probably due to the general lockdown. They spend on average more than an hour a day. According to a study conducted by Harris Interactive, about 35% of French youth aged 15 to 24 used the social network in May 2020.

Moreover, this age group accounts for 40% of French users. In the same period, more than 270 million videos and 248 million hashtags challenges were created by these users. 56% of them are women.

TikTok in the world

As of January 2022, TikTok has more than 800 million active users worldwide, according to Datareportal. The network announced in September 2021 that it had exceeded one billion monthly active users. The majority of these come from the USA, Europe, India and Brazil. 

According to AppAnnie, the network is expected to reach and exceed one and a half billion active monthly users by the second half of this year. 

34% of the world’s TikTok users are teenagers aged 16 to 24 and 32% are aged 25 to 34. On average, users around the world spend about 52 minutes a day. 

Moreover, 49% of them claim to have made purchases there following an advertisement or promotion on the network.

What is TikTok shopping?

ByteDance did not stop there for its little gem. In August 2021, TikTok partnered with Shopify, the e-commerce giant, to promote a previously only possible feature on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. This is the social selling TikTok Shopping feature.

TikTok Shopping is the latest feature in TikTok that allows sellers to promote their products and directly interact with prospects. This service offers its users the possibility to purchase products directly via the seller’s TikTok profile. 

The aim of both companies is to facilitate online sales. With this feature, they seek to create and optimize advertising campaigns directly from the Shopify dashboard through TikTok marketing ads. 

What do you get with TikTok shopping?

As described above, the TikTok Shopping feature allows you to boost your sales and awareness on the social network and improve your customer relationships. You can create a store on TikTok and include links to your products on Shopify. You can also post these links in the short videos you make on your TikTok account. The network also gives you the ability to synchronize your product catalogs by creating virtual shops on your TikTok profile. 

Who has access to TikTok Shopping?

To date, TikTok Shopping is only available to the US, UK and Canada. However, you can also access it if you have an e-commerce store on Shopify and a TikTok For Business account. These are the two needed conditions for other countries to gain access.

How do I access TikTok Shopping?

To access TikTok Shopping, you must first have a professional and well-optimized TikTok For Business account. In other words, you must properly:

• fill in your autobiography;
• put a presentable photo of you or your company logo;
• put a presentable, succinct, clear and without any grammatical errors of the activities you carry out and the products you sell.

Once this first configuration is successful, you can launch your advertising campaigns with the TikTok For Business platform. This platform has been accessible to the French since the signing of the agreement between Shopify and TikTok. You must also have an e-commerce store on Shopify that will be linked to your TikTok account.

To make your task easier, you can simply consult the help center set up by TikTok for this purpose.

How to optimize your TikTok store?

Have you finished setting up your business account? Congratulations! Now is the time to put marketing strategies in place to succeed with your advertising campaigns. To do this, you must meet well-defined criteria.

Improve the visibility of your catalog on TikTok

You must follow two simple rules set up by TikTok. First, it is important that you put quality photos on your window. Photos of your products on sale are the first thing that attracts the potential prospect. It is these photos that catch his attention and lead him to visit your product catalog. So you must present them well. Put on clear, presentable and realistic photos. You must do the same on your other platforms and catalogs linked to your TikTok account.

The second rule concerns all your written texts. For the titles of your products, they must not exceed the 34 characters limit and must contain essential information about the product for sale. As for the description, it must be quite long. The description of a product must include all the details of that product. A customer who reads a product description must see included all the information he needs to make a purchasing decision. Also pay close attention to grammar and spelling errors in your texts.

Promote your shop and products 

One aspect of social selling is communication with the customer. So don’t wait for them to come to you, it’s up to you to attract them. To do this, you can use several ways:

• Make it clear to your subscribers that they must click on the “Shopping” tab to access the e-commerce stores, and in this case yours. To showcase this, you can do short video tutorials;
• Encourage TikTok Shopping users to click on your links. To do this, use precise hashtags which include the keywords of the domain in which you are practicing. These hashtags will increase your content’s going viral potential. A trick to using them is to launch challenges about using your products;
• Make your marketing campaigns through live videos;
• Work with influencers to increase the number of your visitors and therefore your likely customers. 

Following social networks such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, TikTok is the 9th most visited social network each month. It launched into social selling through its TikTok Shopping feature. This feature was born from its collaboration with the giant Shopify. 

It offers you the opportunity to increase the number of your customers, to improve your awareness and especially to develop your customer relationship. 

But to get there, you need to implement an excellent advertising campaign strategy. To do this, some simple but important rules must be followed.