Want to Sell on TikTok? For Many Chinese Merchants, It Isn’t So Simple.
SINGAPORE—As TikTok pushes to expand its e-commerce business globally, the viral short-video app is turning to a group of sellers for help: Chinese merchants. TikTok is hoping such vendors will expand its online retail offerings. However, the app’s background as a haven for catchy dances and lip syncs has confounded even experienced sellers, more accustomed to retailing on traditional shopping platforms such as Amazon.com.
Lina Pan, a 46-year-old Chinese merchant based in Chaozhou, southern China, sold soap dispensers and shampoo bottles through a store she set up on TikTok. She paid $4,300 for access to a seven-hour prerecorded class, in which the instructor promised to unveil the secrets to “earning millions" on TikTok. The course led her to post videos dishing out household tips, such as using Coca-Cola to remove stains from toilet bowls and frying pans and nifty ways to slice up pineapples.
The millions didn’t materialize. “Selling on TikTok is just not as easy as I thought it would be," said Pan, who shut her store after five months of trying. In September, TikTok expanded the e-commerce service TikTok Shop to all of its 150 million users in the U.S., the app’s largest market, after testing the service with select users there for months.
In August, TikTok, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, started allowing China-based sellers to open storefronts on the app in the U.S. market. It also has been testing a new business model of selling products on behalf of Chinese vendors, a model similar to Amazon’s “Sold by Amazon" program, putting it in competition with popular shopping platforms such as Shein and Temu.
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