Just in Time for the Holidays: TikTok Shop Hits the US

It seems like Santa came early this year for e-commerce brands: TikTik shop is now officially available in the US. Previously, the social media giant’s shopping platform was only available in select markets like China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the UK, leaving brands wondering when it would make the trip stateside. 

According to an announcement on TikTok’s blog, the shopping feature is now available to the US market. Let’s take a closer look at what this means for e-commerce brands and how to make the most of this exciting new sales platform.

Connecting to TikTok Through Cymbio

Before we dive into the benefits and features of TikTok Shop, it’s worth mentioning that taking full advantage of this platform isn’t without its complexities. As e-commerce brands expand onto a new social commerce channel, they face new challenges in managing orders and inventory. However, TikTok has teamed up with multi-channel support platforms like Cymbio to make this transition smoother.

Cymbio acts as the bridge between your brand and TikTok Shop, connecting you to various e-commerce platforms, retailers, dropship platforms, and marketplaces seamlessly. This eliminates the need for you to handle technical intricacies, allowing you to focus your resources on other critical aspects of your business, such as strategy, sales, and customer service.

Here’s how Cymbio can automate and simplify your operations on TikTok Shop:

• Inventory Syncing: Cymbio ensures that your product inventory is synchronized from your e-commerce platform to TikTok Shop, preventing issues like overselling or stockouts.
• Order Management: It handles order processing, returns, and cancellations efficiently, saving you time and reducing errors.
• Collections and Reconciliations: Managing transactions across multiple channels becomes effortless with Cymbio, ensuring seamless financial reconciliation.
• Product Data Management: Cymbio auto-fills product information, including images and descriptions, according to TikTok Shop’s specifications.
• Pricing Control: You can set and adjust prices in various currencies for different sales platforms with ease.
• Reporting and Analytics: Cymbio collects data and provides analytics to help you make informed decisions and optimize your TikTok Shop strategy.

With Cymbio’s automation platform, you can confidently fulfill orders, knowing that your sales on TikTok Shop are running smoothly in the background. This not only streamlines your operations but also enhances the customer experience, which is crucial, especially during peak holiday sales seasons.

By leveraging Cymbio’s capabilities, you can scale your business on TikTok Shop without the need to exponentially increase your budget or workforce, enabling sustainable growth for your brand.

TikTok: The Most Shopped Social Channel in the UK

According to research from the Retail Technology Show, TikTok is the most shopped social channel, surpassing even Facebook and Instagram. Users in the UK make 10 purchases a year on average on TikTok, compared to 9 on Meta channels. Gen Z shoppers are making even more purchases than the average UK buyer, completing 19 purchases through TikTok per year compared to 18 on Instagram and 15 on Facebook. 

The Retail Technology Show Event Director, Matt Bradley, commented on this significant rise in UK TikTok sales: “With new platforms and new evolutions of social commerce itself, such as the Metaverse, becoming more mainstream, shoppers are migrating towards these new formats, with TikTok now leading the way as the most shopped social network.”

There’s no denying the power of social commerce, especially on younger generations, and the addition of TikTok Shop as an avenue for sales in the US presents a new opportunity to maximize sales, increase brand awareness, and reach new audiences.

6 Key Benefits of Selling through TikTok Shop

For brands looking to scale their reach through social media, TikTok offers a reliable way to reach shoppers where they are. As a quickly growing platform known for its capacity for virality and trending content, brands can take advantage of the platform’s features to connect with shoppers and get their products in front of a wide audience. Let’s look at some of the key benefits of selling on TikTok Shop:

1. Access to a young and engaged audience: As we saw earlier with TikTok Shop in the UK, shoppers on TikTok are more engaged than on other social platforms, making them more receptive to new trends and products.
2. Grow brand awareness and visibility: TikTok gives your brand the potential to be seen by thousands of new sets of eyes as users scroll through their feeds looking for new content and trends.
3. Limitless user-generated content (USG): Brands can tap into TikTok’s endless supply of USG and even encourage followers to create content surrounding their products in order to expand reach even more.
4. Collaboration opportunities: TikTok creators have a massive impact on the platform’s users, so by establishing your brand on TikTok Shop, you can reach out to influencers to authentically promote your products to their followers to help build trust and credibility.
5. Direct communication: Interact with your audience in an organic way through comments, messages, and live streams. Building a personal touch helps build loyalty and trust.
6. Mobile-first: Mobile shopping now makes up 60% of all global e-commerce sales. As a platform primarily used on mobile devices, TikTok offers shoppers a convenient way to shop on their phones or tablets.

TikTok Shop Features for Brands

With TikTok Shop, there’s more than just one way to monetize your brand and sell products. TikTok has made it possible for brands to sell items in a variety of ways:

• In-feed posts: Shop for products tagged in a video post.
• LIVE shopping: Shop directly from LIVEs in the For You feed.
• Product Showcase: Users can browse product reviews, tiles, and learn more about a brand from a profile page.
• Shop Tab: Brands can promote their products on a marketplace where TikTok users can search to discover new items. Products are recommended through shoppable listings and users can manage orders in the Shop Tab.
• Affiliate Program: In addition to selling directly on the app, brands can connect with creators who will earn commissions as an affiliate for sharing their products.
• Shop Ads: TikTok Shop Ads allow you to place your brand and products in front of new users in the app.
• Fulfilled by TikTok: TikTok Shop can store, pack, and ship seller’s products as an additional logistics solution.
• Secure Checkout: Working with third-party payment platforms, TikTok Shop enables users to pay for items directly through the app while ensuring their data is secure.

How Does TikTok Shop Work?

This all may sound enticing, but you might be wondering how exactly TikTok Shop works. In other words, how do brands monetize short videos on a social platform?

TikTok is home to hundreds of ongoing trends, thousands of influencers, and endless USG. With community-driven trends like #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt highlighting items users discovered through TikTok, the opportunities for monetizing on products users are already promoting are huge. TikTok is creating a space for a new culture of shopping and product discovery, where users film themselves trying out new items from beauty products to clothing, electronics, children’s items, and more.

Up until now, you were still able to promote these products on TikTok, but you would need to exit the app to complete a purchase of an item you see in a video. Now, with TikTok Shop, the experience is seamless and purchases can be made directly from within the app with shoppable videos and LIVE streams. This gives creators and brands the power to sell their products to shoppers who are already highly engaged and ready to convert.

TikTok Shop can be integrated with major e-commerce platforms such as WooCommerce, Shopify, Magneto, BigCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and more. TikTok has also made it possible to connect thousands of different apps and integrations to bolster e-commerce operations, like Printful, Zendesk, Easyship, Yotpo, and more.

However, taking on a new social e-commerce channel isn’t easy. With increased sales comes a need to manage orders and inventory on a new platform, which is why TikTok has partnered with multi-channel support platforms like Cymbio to make it easier for brands to connect.

Automate TikTok Shop Operations with Cymbio

Selling on a global social channel like TikTok comes with a lot of opportunities, but it also means a lot of new challenges to face when adopting a new platform. Luckily, there are multi-channel e-commerce platforms like Cymbio to help you make the onboarding process smooth and simple. 

Cymbio connects brands with retailers, dropship platforms, and marketplaces behind the scenes, meaning you can connect to the different e-commerce platforms retailers use without any technical planning on your end. This way, selling is streamlined and automated across multiple channels, making it easier to focus your resources on other aspects of your business, like strategy, sales, and customer service.

With Cymbio, brands on TikTok Shop can automate different tasks, such as:

• Inventory syncing from your e-commerce platform to TikTok Shop
• Order management, returns, and cancellations
• Collections and reconciliations from multiple channels
• Product data such as images and descriptions are auto-filled according to TikTok Shop’s specifications
• Control and set prices in various currencies for different sales platforms
• Report and analytics collection to make more informed decisions

With Cymbio’s automation platform, you’re able to deliver orders confidently knowing that your sales on platforms like TikTok Shop are running on autopilot. You can also ensure a better customer experience by turning to automations to make processes run more smoothly, reliably, and quickly, which is important year-round but especially during the upcoming holiday season when order volume increases. With Cymbio, you can scale your business without drastically scaling your budget or your resources, empowering your business to grow sustainably.

TikTok Shop: A World of Opportunity

TikTok Shop’s arrival in the US presents an exciting new avenue for brands in many industries to promote their products. With TikTok’s wide reach, high engagement levels, and shoppers ready to purchase, adding this channel to your e-commerce sales strategy is a pretty safe bet. 

That said, properly preparing your brand for TikTok Shop can be time-consuming and resource-intensive, and you don’t want to miss the boat on this opportunity, especially before peak holiday sales season. With Cymbio, you can confidently onboard new sales channels like TikTok Shop with minimal disruption to your existing workflow, empowering you to reap the rewards of a new channel while automating most of the work.