The popular viral microvideos application TikTok aims to boost its expansion in the United States with its landing in the e-commerce business, which threatens to open a new confrontation between the app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance with the social media giant Facebook. according to the ‘Financial Times’ newspaper, which cites sources familiar with the TikTok plans.
According to these people, TikTok would have informed advertisers about a series of new functionalities of the application for 2021, including a tool that would allow the most popular users to share links to products and thus automatically obtain a commission for sales.
Likewise, the application would also aim to implement functions so that brands can display catalogs of their products on the platform, as well as the launch of purchases “transmitted live”, a version for mobile phones of teleshopping channels, where users they can purchase products with a few clicks after being featured by TikTok stars.
The introduction of these tools on the TikTok platform, which has already announced an alliance for online purchases with Shopify, would intensify its rivalry with Facebook, after the company founded by Mark Zuckerberg introduced tools on Instagram last year in some countries. to facilitate shopping.
In fact, last summer, Kevin Mayer, the former Disney executive who for a few months served as CEO of TikTok, accused Facebook of wanting to end the US presence of TikTok through “malicious attacks” disguised as patriotism, including the launch of successive products that mimicked the micro-video platform.
Last week, TikTok announced its first major agreement with an advertising agency by agreeing to give privileged access to the British giant WPP to the new advertising features developed by the application, whose audience is mainly concentrated among the younger audience and in many cases still without linking to other social networks.
However, the newspaper recalls that the Chinese app has faced serious problems in the US in recent times, including the threat of blockade by the country’s former president, Donald Trump, and it is not yet clear what the position of the administration led will be. by Joe Biden.
