Omnichannel marketing is a key for all kinds of businesses to establish recognition and boost sales. This strategy includes SMS and email marketing, advertisement, and social media marketing. As current trends dictate, you must pay extra attention to TikTok, a social media platform that nowadays gains user engagement like no other. Moreover, the platform now offers many features and secure means for direct sales, dropshipping and other commercial online activities. Whether you’re a DTC brand, a service provider or a well-known B2B company, TikTok ecommerce is a worth investment and a great addition to your promotional strategy.
Then, how to implement it correctly? We’ll give you some ideas.
In this article, we’ll share the best TikTok strategies for ecommerce businesses, successful examples and other useful info.
What is TikTok Ecommerce?
First, let’s start our introduction with outlining the definition. The term “TikTok e-commerce” describes the incorporation of TikTok shopping features into the app, enabling users to explore, find, and buy things straight from the platform. It gives professional marketers the opportunity to highlight their goods in a variety of ways, such as advertisements, influencer-sponsored content, and product pages specifically designed for purchasing.
Thanks to the variety of instruments like personalized exploration and a huge user base, the platform introduces your business to 1B+ consumers. Potential buyers use ecommerce TikTok as a go-to location for product suggestions from trusted content creators. This type of engaged exploration also aids in their purchasing decisions, making the audience ready to shop.
Overall, the app makes it easy for users to make purchases, making shopping convenient. This type of e-commerce makes use of platform’s visually stimulating and engaging content to increase sales and brand interaction. That is the essential TikTok ecommerce meaning.
TikTok Ecommerce Statistics
The popularity of TikTok has exploded, and the statistics show that it only continues to grow. The company doesn’t stand still, as well—answering user demand, TikTok launched many features for ecommerce. This elevated the use of the platform for commercial purposes and encouraged businesses to invest. Let’s take a look at numbers and general statistics for ecommerce TikTok that the app currently operates with.
- TikTok is the 2nd most popular social media network for purchases among Gen Z consumers, after Instagram. This demographic uses the social media platform particularly frequently. A lot of people use social media to get inspiration for shopping, and this inspiration frequently results in impulsive purchases.
- The app was ranked as the most popular social media channel for impulsive purchases in a 2022 survey, according to Statista.
- Over 70% of worldwide TikTok users started shopping as soon as they came across products in feeds or live stories.
- An estimated 23.7 million TikTok users in the US have made purchases through the platform directly or through links on the app as of 2022. This number is predicted to rise by almost 67% by 2026, to a total of 39.5 million TikTok social purchasers.
- TikTok was the most popular platform among American app users who bought things based on the posts of others.
- The popular hashtag #tiktokmademebuyit has over 7.4M posts (as of the moment of writing this article), showing that users buy things recommended by others on this network.
- 85% of purchases in the first month following TikTok Shop U.S.’s grand debut were in the beauty care sector. It is the most popular e-commerce category on TikTok ecommerce platform. The reason why beauty is so popular in social commerce is because accessories, jewelry, body care products, and cosmetics all work well with the influencer sales model on social media.
Why Use TikTok for Ecommerce Brands
Adaptive businesses quickly caught a wind of this app and its potential for marketing. They saw it as a well of opportunities for promotion and sales, invested, and harvested positive results. The popularity of the platform and abundance of profitable outcomes now make it almost impossible for online sellers not to tap into this channel. Let’s see what benefits of ecommerce on TikTok attract businesses the most.
- Engagement rates
Fair and square, anyone who creates content can get engagement. The main rule is that the content has to be creative and original to grab users’ attention and be given priority by TikTok’s algorithm. This implies that even tiny e-commerce companies with unknown products may be able to go viral and connect with more people. This evens chances in the competition with bigger businesses (not entirely but still).
- Increased brand recognition and sales
The natural result of increased engagement is your brand becoming more recognizable, which establishes you as a player in the market and helps build trust. Of course, with more people seeing your products and interacting with the brand, the chances that they place an order increase. More sales is exactly the main goal of using TikTok for ecommerce.
- Simple setup and use
No special skills are needed to start promoting your products or services on TikTok. The platform allows marketers and business owners to create virtual storefronts using TikTok shopping features, which we explore further in the article. With available instruments for online commerce, brands can showcase, promote, and sell goods, all without making clients to ever leave the app. Pretty cool, right?
- Strong influencer community
An extremely engaged audience could be reached by your e-commerce firm collaborating with TikTok influencers. Trusted influencers with great following can effectively advertise goods, expose your company to your target market, provide insightful evaluations, increase traffic and revenue, and more.
- Wide demographics
As we’ve already seen from statistics, TikTok has more than a billion active users all around the world. Although this particular social network is well-known for being popular with Generation Z, its user base is becoming more and more varied, with millennials and even older generations joining in. Therefore, regardless of what you sell, you can always find the target audience here with the right strategy.
How to Use TikTok for Ecommerce
Talking about strategies, the company offers a number of efficient instruments that help TikTok ecommerce brands to achieve goals. Here’s what you can use for successful marketing and sales on the app.
TikTok SEO for Ecommerce
Search engine optimization is an effective strategy for promotion not only on Google but social media platforms too. Because lengthier captions and larger character restrictions enable more deliberate keyword usage, TikTok SEO has become essential for content makers. Creators can increase the visibility and trend of their videos in particular categories by equipping their descriptions with pertinent SEO keywords. This practice is particularly advantageous for regional service providers that want to increase their visibility in a certain location.
Videos that are optimized for search engines show up and are given prominent placement, which increases views and interaction. For example, if appropriately optimized, a video with the title “How to sell on TikTok” has the potential to trend and rank highly in search results. This tactic is similar to how important SEO is on sites like YouTube, where “how-to” videos are very popular.
For ecommerce brands on TikTok, it means that they can also use this strategy to push their content up in search results.
TikTok for Business features increase optimized content visibility even more, giving it more exposure. The method emphasizes the value of search-based content and is consistent with more general digital marketing methods.
TikTok Shop
Users can search for and buy things straight from the TikTok app thanks to the feature called TikTok Shop for ecommerce. It lets users shop easily without ever leaving the app and gives brands and companies a chance to present their goods to TikTok’s large user base. Through brand agreements or affiliate marketing, creators can promote products and earn money by integrating TikTok Shop into their content.
This instrument allows businesses of all sizes and directions to set up sales of their products in 3 main ways.
- Publish Shoppable Videos, Go Live, and Highlight Products.
- Promote products by collaborating with producers. The TikTok Shop Affiliate program facilitates commission-based collaboration between sellers and brands and creators.
- Use the seller center’s reviews and analytics dashboard to gain information into the products and sales success
The process of selling is also rather intuitive for users. They’ll see your product link directly in the related post. To buy the showcased item, they simply need to click on the link that will take them to the product detail page. There, customers have the opportunity to see product description, color options, available sizes, reviews, etc., which is basically the same experience as with usual online stores. Next steps, shipping order and checkout, are carried out without leaving the app as well. Streamlined and simple experience with TikTok shopping is one of the biggest advantages for ecommerce brands.
TikTok Shopping Ads
Businesses can advertise on the platform by promoting their items directly to customers with TikTok Shopping Ads. Through these advertisements, companies highlight their goods inside the user interface, giving customers a flawless buying experience. You can use Video Shopping Ads as your one-stop advertising solution for all e-commerce TikTok campaign needs. Video Shopping Ads assist customers in finding products and direct them to your website so they may make purchases. The feature targets users according to their demographics, hobbies, and habits in an effort to increase sales and conversions. For a comprehensive TikTok ecommerce strategy, use this instrument to increase sales.
UGC for TikTok Ecommerce Businesses
Demand for user-generated content (UGC) has surged as more marketers look to content creators to produce brief videos. Involving content creators with established audiences is another way to use TikTok for ecommerce. Both small DTC businesses and large B2C enterprises connect with micro-bloggers and famous influencers to spread the word about their offers, receive reviews, and promote their brands. This practice is especially useful for new sellers that lack the knowledge or resources to produce video content in-house.
UGC is also very helpful for e-commerce firms that want to use tutorials and product demonstrations to highlight their products. Apart from arranged collaborations, wise brands also monitor generic posts with reviews from their actual clients and know how to use them in advantageous ways.
Ecommerce TikTok Best Practices
Now that you know major instruments and strategies, let’s look into the best TikTok ecommerce practices. Here we share some practical advice and techniques that actually work.
Best TikTok Ecommerce Practices for Marketing
Employ #hashtags and keywords
TikTok has a hashtag feature that enables users to look for relevant content and connect with people who share their interests. These hashtags, e.g. #haircare, #sports, #style, #makeup, etc. enable viewers to locate content creators and material fast without having to go through hundreds of videos on their For You page.
The SEO strategy, that we mentioned above, involves the use of keywords to elevate your posts in the search. To do it correctly, you need to:
- know your target audience;
- understand possible search intents;
- research keywords (works the same as for Google Search);
- incorporate chosen keywords into your content and hashtags.
Our recommendation: if you’re at a loss of where to start, use hashtags like #Entrepreneur, #DTC, or #SmallBusiness to discover how other companies are generating content and advertising their goods. Alternatively, consider creating a unique hashtag to draw attention to your goods. You could even design an entertaining TikTok challenge to go along with it.
Use Ads
For the purpose of developing and managing various types of ads, TikTok Business accounts and the TikTok Ads Manager provide useful tools. We’ve already outlined that the Shopping Ads strategy is useful, but it brings the best result only if done right.
As one of the TikTok ecommerce best practices, we advise using several formats of advertisements for your promotional campaigns.
- Dynamic Showcase Ads
These are designed for huge catalogs and use your synchronized catalog to show relevant products to interested users.
- Collection advertising
To encourage instant sales, this kind of ad format includes product cards, video advertising, and a full-screen landing page.
- Spark Ads
Brands may use natural TikTok postings and features in their advertising by utilizing this native ad display.
- Lead generation advertisements
With these advertising, you can use personalized forms to gather leads, and you can combine them with CRM partners to assist qualify and convert leads.
Connect with influencers and creators
As we mentioned, constant connection with creators and monitoring of posts related to your brand can help a lot. This is a fantastic TikTok ecommerce practice to attract people to notice your business. Just because a creator found a product they love, bragged about it in a video, and shared it with their followers, might lead a company to explode on the social media. You could see it in the presented statistics, that many users actually buy things recommended by other users.
Some brands have no need for paid advertising, since a lot of viral videos aren’t created by compensated influencers; regular TikTok users who want to share the things they liked.
Our recommendation: TikTok’s Selling Center, TikTok for Business Inspiration Center, Creator Marketplace are excellent resources to use. With their help, you can create a promotion strategy and use the collaboration tools to identify creators in your target market.
TikTok Ecommerce Best Practices for Sales
Create TikTok Shop
To get real sales on the platform, we recommend to set up and use the TikTok Shop feature as one of the best practices for ecommerce on TikTok. Some businesses prefer simply putting a website link in their description, but this “lazy” approach might cost you profit. Some people are wary of opening unknown links (rightfully so), therefore you may lose potential clients. At the same time, the Shop on the app is secure and simple to use.
It’s also easy to set up. Here’s a brief instruction.
- You must have a TikTok account and a phone or email.
- To start the setup, go to Register on the official website.
- Enter your contact and business details.
- Select your business type, then send in the necessary documents.
- Wait 2 to 3 days for your application review approval.
- Connect your bank account.
- Done! Products now can be uploaded and sold online.
If you already have an online store on another platform like Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, etc. you can connect it to your TikTok account and sync product and sales.
Use all ecommerce features for sales
TikTok has added a number of new features to increase user interaction and revenue-generating potential. Our recommendation is to utilize all the available opportunities. These include extra advantages for members with subscriber-only videos during LIVE sessions, and increased brand partnerships through the TikTok Creative Challenge. Users now also write text posts, use Effect House to explore new revenue streams, and access TikTok series to access premium content. Additionally, the Creativity Program and Sounds for Business now offer bespoke sounds, giving TikTok ecommerce businesses and content creators more tools to produce engaging content. Lastly, the TikTok World Hub offers a forum for businesses and creators to discuss and discover the best methods for creating and promoting content, including the TikTok Fundamentals course.
Examples of Successful TikTok Ecommerce Marketing
To fasten the information we’ve shared with you so far, let’s look at a few prominent examples of ecommerce brands on TikTok that succeed in their marketing campaigns and sales.
Chipotle – B2C TikTok Ecommerce
Country: the USA
Followers: 2.3M
Likes: 53.7M
Case: TikTok ecommerce promotion
The first TikTok ecommerce example is a well-known business-to-consumer food firm, Chipotle, that has developed a significant online presence very quickly. Their regular production of entertaining and captivating material that appeals to the audience is the reason for their success on the site. Chipotle’s approach consists of following trends, taking part in competitions, and making straightforward yet funny movies. Chipotle’s profile is a great resource for anyone looking for ideas for their content because it demonstrates how to effectively engage users and promote their business.
Love, Bonito – International DTC
Country: Singapore
Followers: 103K
Likes: 971.2K
Case: Online sales for international audience
Love, Bonito, a fashion business owned by Singaporeans, has prospered in the fast-paced, extremely competitive fashion market. With the help of TikTok as a marketing tool, Love, Bonito has become well-known example of ecommerce DTC brands on TikTok and successful throughout the world. Through a continuous strategy of showing fashionable clothing alongside popular music, the brand efficiently engages its audience. What’s more, posting outfit suggestions that highlight its products creates a lot of buzz in the comments area and directs customers to physical stores.
The Clear Cut – Direct-to-Consumer NYC Startup
Country: the USA
Followers: 89.5K
Likes: 2.9M
Case: TikTok ecommerce marketing for startups
Another fantastic TikTok e-commerce brand example is The Clear Cut, a NYC-based jewelry company that uses the app strategically to exhibit different jewelry pieces and capitalize on viral events. The startup makes sure that its audience is exposed to a variety of interesting content by concentrating on engagement ring trend forecasts. In 2023, the company allocated less than 3% of its typical media budget on TikTok. At the same time, it maintains its confidence in the platform’s growing potential and its capacity to generate viral moments that raise brand awareness.
Gymshark – TikTok Challenge Experts
Country: Great Britain
Followers: 5.5M
Likes: 99.5M
Case: Viral content and TikTok Shop
British sportswear brand Gymshark makes a name for itself on TikTok by emphasizing fun challenges above conventional exercise programming. Their “66 Days: Change Your Life” challenge has been especially popular, garnering millions of new followers and 200 million views on the #gymshark66 hashtag. Gymshark’s unique and participatory approach to brand concept is a prominent TikTok marketing example for ecommerce businesses.
Conclusion
Just like Klaviyo has become a powerhouse for email marketing, TikTok is now the main actor in social media marketing. It is a place for retailers to increase brand awareness and broaden their reach. With recent developments, ecommerce businesses on TikTok thrive, competing in creativeness and the expert use of available marketing and shopping tools. Regardless of what business you run, it’s always a mastery to make every opportunity work to your advantage. If you need any advice from professional marketers, contact Flowium to receive consulting on important matters and the required assistance.
