• by Colin Kirkland , January 4, 2024

With Americans becoming more comfortable shopping on Chinese e-commerce apps, and concerns about a nationwide TikTok ban evaporating, ByteDance’s TikTok is looking to grow its short-form video shopping platform, TikTok Shop, tenfold in the U.S. to $17.5 billion in 2024.

According to information Bloomberg obtained from internal meetings about the 2024 merchandise volume goal for the U.S. version of TikTok Shop, the company is hoping its social-media reach paired with its viral videos and live-shopping model -- proven successful by China’s doppleganger app Douyin -- will result in TikTok Shop becoming a direct competitor with Amazon, Temu and Shein. 

Last year, TikTok was on track to hit about $20 billion in global gross merchandise value, with the majority of sales originating in Southeast Asia, the report notes.

The company is now looking to expand sales across the U.S. and Latin America, where TikTok is planning to launch TikTok Shop in the coming months.  

To help persuade continuous activity on the app in the U.S., TikTok offers influencers free shipping and subsidies for selling goods in videos and live streams. Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals that the company pushed in November resulted in over 5 million new U.S. customers buying products on the app, the company says. 

Recent reports also state that TikTok will begin raising the commission it charges on most in-app items from 2% to 8% per transaction, which are still lower than Amazon’s typical 15% seller fees.

ByteDance’s revenue outpaced the projected growth of major social-media companies like Meta Platforms and Tencent Holdings, surging roughly 30% in 2023 to more than $110 billion.

TikTok Shop is still fairly new. The feature officially launched in the U.S. in September, with over 200,000 registered sellers and 100,000 content creators participating in an affiliate program that allowed users who had 5,000 followers to create videos that went straight to the platform's “For You” feed.

If it becomes nearly as successful as Douyin, TikTok -- which has 150 million users in the U.S. and 2 billion worldwide -- will prove for the first time that live stream shopping can thrive on a large scale in the West.