Walmart’s late entry this week into the struggle to buy TikTok’s US operations left some people with a question.
Two questions, one:
Walmart? Really?
But the giant collaboration between the giant retailer and Microsoft to launch the video app in the United States makes more sense in light of the direction the owner of TikTok has his kinship app in China, their homeland , taken.
That version of the app, Douyin, which is very similar to TikTok but only available in China, has not only become a platform for goofy videos, but also an e-commerce destination with that kind of reach among young buyers who Walmart would like to have.
The Chinese social media giant that runs both apps, ByteDance, began testing e-commerce features on Douyin in 2018. That was well before the company rolled out a “Shop Now” button on TikTok in recent months that users redirects to store pages.
Smartphone users in China have largely taken things in stride while watching people smash the products – thinking that late-night QVC and television commercials have been reinvented for the mobile age. Chinese e-commerce platforms have been adding livestreaming to their apps for years, and video apps have added in-store features. In total, $ 140 billion in merchandise could be sold this year via live streaming, more than double last year’s amount, according to estimates by research firm Bernstein.
The large size of the Chinese consumer market has also created a large field for experiments by retailers of other types. One of the country’s newest e-commerce giants, Pinduoduo, has turned online shopping into something more than a surrealist video game. For fans of Pinduoduo, the process of stumbling across early new products, at very low prices, is a big part of the experience. The actual receipt of those products is almost secondary. Currently, nearly 570 million people use the Pinduoduo app every month.
Douyin began allowing video makers to post links to their stores on China’s largest online bazaar, Alibaba’s Taobao platform. Eventually, users were able to set up store fronts in the Douyin app itself, and now it’s aggressively encouraging creators to sell through these native stores instead of on outside sites.
For most Chinese consumers, Douyin is not about to replace Taobao and other full-fledged shopping sites. The app’s design means that the products that sell best are cheap impulse purchases, said Fabian Bern, head of Many, a marketing company that works with creators at Douyin and TikTok.
“You scroll through content very quickly,” Bern said, which means that a few people in the app buy an expensive wristwatch, for example. “You’ll think about it twice, then the video is basically gone.”
“That’s why I think the Walmart thing is pretty interesting,” he added. “They can sell their cheaper products directly to that audience in TikTok.”
Bargain bin prices do not guarantee customer satisfaction. Last year, an anonymous author wrote a widely shared account about buying half a pound of dry shrimp on Douyin and feeling cheated. The app showed chubby palm-sized specimens that were apparently grilled at home by a friendly-looking lady. But the shrimp that came in the mail were small and smelly, the person wrote. When the person tried to get a refund, there was not much information to be found.
Mr Bern acknowledged that ByteDance had a lot to learn when it came to customer service in retail. He said that while TikTok’s e-commerce features were not yet as advanced as Douyin’s, it was in part because Chinese influencers were more enterprising about their attempts to convert their profession as video stars into sales of physical products.
TikTok’s more global audience has also forced ByteDance to be more cautious about platform changes than Douyin.
“We have seen TikTok become just like Douyin. It’s just a little slower, ‘said Mr Bern. “There’s nothing unique about TikTok that was not on Douyin.”
Lin Qiqing contributed research.
