TikTok is back – for now. But a host of competitors see an opportunity in its uncertain future to make a play for the growing number of consumers using the platform to shop.
In 2023, with the launch of the TikTok Shop in the US, the social media platform succeeded where rivals had tried and largely failed for years: it turned the viral video movement into a sizeable e-commerce business. Users can buy products — like baggy jeans and lip gloss — directly from the videos.
In addition to providing a windfall of commissions to creators, the For You Page platform quickly became a powerful discovery engine for smaller, lesser-known brands who could hope the algorithm would put them in front of millions of customers. possible. In the first three months after its US launch, TikTok Shop amassed over 500,000 sellers.
YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat are among a number of apps vying to capture the lucrative TikTok Shop market. For a few hours on Sunday, when TikTok shut down to comply with a US ban, it looked like their moment had arrived. The platform is up and running again, and President Donald Trump has vowed to save it, though that would likely require owner ByteDance to sell TikTok, or Congress to overturn the ban.
But even if the app takes off once again, it’s not clear if any of its rivals are able to deliver the seamless, algorithm-driven shopping experience that drew so many people to the TikTok Store.
“Uniqueness [of TikTok] it’s the algorithm and consumer behavior,” said Nadya Okamoto, co-founder of August, a period care brand that launched on the TikTok Shop in October 2024.
TikTok’s success with e-commerce has been inextricably linked to its creator-driven ecosystem. Brands can easily engage a wide network of influencers, thanks to TikTok’s backend automations that simplified the process of seeding products at scale, said Kevin Gould, co-founder of nail care brand Glamnetic.
“Transitioning our influencer strategy to YouTube and Instagram would require a more manual process and we wouldn’t have as much reach,” he added.
That doesn’t stop those platforms and others from giving the best to e-commerce. Whether they succeed will depend on how effectively they can mimic, or even improve upon, what has worked on the TikTok Store.
Checkout on Instagram
The Meta-owned app was one of the first movers in the social commerce space when it launched Instagram Checkout in 2019, allowing brands to integrate their product catalogs with their feeds. Instagram offered brands a polished user interface that would give their products a premium appeal, a position that had eluded the TikTok store.
Instagram also rivals TikTok in terms of the size of its user base, with more than 160 million Americans active on the platform, making it a natural alternative for brands looking to transition, as many users are already engaged. there.
However, in the years since launch, brands across fashion and beauty have found the platform’s foray into e-commerce too clumsy to be useful.
“Instagram [Checkout] because we’ve never seen enough success for me to even look at the dashboard regularly,” Okamoto said. “But I always have Tiktok Seller Central open and refresh it maybe 10 times a day.”
Other brands, including Gray Matters, have also complained about Instagram Checkout limited ability to add product descriptionsthereby complicating the customer journey, as consumers only used Instagram Checkout as a way to check the price of an item before going to a brand’s homepage.
For Okamoto, the platform’s algorithm doesn’t allow for product discovery, making it difficult for smaller brands with tighter advertising budgets to stand out.
“Tiktok has this unique ability to somehow amplify everyone and anyone. Anything can be a trend, Okamoto added. “Instagram is where you’re catching up with people you’ve been following since high school.”
YouTube purchases
YouTube, as a video-first platform, at first glance seems poised to capture TikTok’s user base and the business of the TikTok Store. YouTube Shorts, a short-form video feed, mimics the flow of TikTok videos and is designed to keep the user engaged for longer.
Okamoto and the August team are considering moving their social commerce operations to YouTube Shopping, an e-commerce integration that began in 2021.
Similar to TikTok, YouTube Shopping allows brands to tag their products in their own content or the content of creators they work with. The platform is powered by Shopify and requires brands and creators to have at least 1,000 subscribers with 4,000 watch hours for long-form videos in the last year or 1 million watch hours on YouTube Shorts in the last 90 days.
Brands without an already established audience on the platform and without a strong content feed may find the transition to YouTube from TikTok more challenging.
What not
A number of live shopping start-ups have come to market recently, hoping to capitalize on the phenomenon that has become popular in China, but WhatNot, with its latest funding round of $265 million that valued the company at $5 billion, leads the pack.
Live streams on the platform have a “sudden death” feature, allowing users to bid on items in a short space of time, creating engagement and urgency. Like TikTok, WhatNot offers sellers the opportunity to host flash sales and launched, in 2023, a rewards system, allowing buyers to receive rewards after a certain number of purchases.
The app, which launched in 2019, was originally aimed at collectors, but has since expanded into accessories, beauty and women’s clothing.
“They’ve just been the perennial sleepers because they really hit it off with these intense collector-type people,” Maloof said. “They’re just not as mainstream.”
The challenge, however, is that while WhatNot’s proposition is attractive, brands will have to convince their customers to join the app, as it has yet to build a user base as large as TikTok, which could prove difficult.
SnapChat
Since 2022, Snapchat has introduced key shopping features designed to entice brands to the platform.
The social media app allows brands to use its augmented reality feature to transform products in their catalogs into virtual fashion that users can “try on” before buying. The platform is also positioned as a site for entertainment through short-form videos and its Spotlight feature, which bears close resemblance to the For You site.
Last week, the company launched a campaign to lure TikTok users to its platform with the tagline “find your favorites on SnapChat.” The campaign could boost the app’s US user base, which has remained stagnant at 100 million. , for the last eight quarters.
Snapchat’s Spotlight feature, however, hasn’t been successful enough to help the platform shed its perception of being the first communication platform for Gen-Z with its popular messages fading away as an entertainment-first platform. .
Pinterest, which has a global user base of over 500 million people, has also made its foray into social commerce in recent years.
The app hopes to entice Gen-Z with its shopping features, such as “product pins” that direct users to brands’ e-commerce sites. The social platform, according to Michael Maloof, vice president at Earnest Analytics, comes closer to TikTok in its algorithm-driven recommendations, allowing for brand discoverability.
“Pinterest users come up with projects. They often put together a look that leads to spending on multiple items,” Maloof said. “You’re interacting with it a little bit more than some of the other platforms, and in turn it’s using your data to find things that might interest you.”
The challenge for brands, however, it would be training their customers to expect to buy on the platform and not just curate images for vision boards. Without the platform having a built-in shopping channel, customers are unlikely to hit the buy button as impulsively as they would on the TikTok Store.
“People really like the combination of discovery and purchase” on TikTok, Maloof said. “It’s the itch that the old department stores used to do, where you’d have this great experience and then come out with great products.”
