Will TikTok become the next major cross-border e-commerce platform for Chinese merchants to tap overseas consumers?

ByteDance-owned TikTok, which is forecast to have 1.5 billion monthly active users worldwide by the end of 2022, launched its live-streaming service in 2019

TikTok’s rise in cross-border e-commerce comes as the ‘made in China, sold on Amazon’ community scrambles to find a new platform to tap overseas consumers

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Published: 10:00am, 26 Feb 2022Updated: 1:07pm, 26 Feb 2022

Liky Li, a live-streamer based in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, often works between midnight and 8am to pitch music boxes and Harry Potter figurines to online consumers in cities such as London and Manchester, instead of those in local locations like Shenzhen or Shanghai.

A former English opera teacher and translator, Li said she is using “Live Shopping on TikTok Shop” – a service under popular short video-sharing platform TikTok – to reach a vast “blue ocean” of unexplored opportunity in cross-border e-commerce.

“Everyone is just getting started, so every step is hard to take, and no one will teach you anything,” said Li, citing the belief of her unidentified boss who is a small Chinese merchant on US e-commerce platform Amazon.com. She said they are betting on the growing reach of TikTok Live to engage more consumers overseas.

ByteDance-owned TikTok, which was projected by research firm eMarketer to have 1.5 billion monthly active users worldwide by the end of this year, launched its live-streaming service in 2019 and introduced new features last year. With the ongoing issues in the “made in China, sold on Amazon” business model, analysts expect TikTok to be well-positioned to transform into a major cross-border e-commerce platform for mainland Chinese merchants.

Guangzhou-based live-streamer Liky Li uses TikTok to engage online consumers in the UK. Photos: Handout

The coronavirus pandemic has turned live-streaming e-commerce into a mainstream marketing tactic in China, and TikTok has gained enough experience through its parent company in this mature market, according to Zhang Yi, chief executive of iiMedia Research.

China’s cross-border e-commerce sector has enjoyed explosive growth since 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic fast-tracked the adoption of online shopping in overseas markets, such as the US and Europe, where consumers who had favoured the bricks-and-mortar retail experience were forced to make more purchases over the internet.