• by Colin Kirkland , December 19, 2023

TikTok is advising sellers on the app’s new live e-commerce platform, “Shop,” to spend more time on the app -- a minimum of two hours -- while streaming “regularly” when their followers are most likely to be online, according to a report by Business Insider.

>TikTok's parent company ByteDance, which is based in China, is more than familiar with the dos and don'ts of livestream shopping via its ownership of Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese sister-app, which generates hundreds of billions of dollars overseas, ranking in the top five of China's biggest online sellers.

This is why the company's instructions to Shop merchants are in line with strategies that have been working in Asian markets for years now.

According to the Business Insider report, it seems to come down to the fact that being on the app longer results in better algorithmic familiarity, which boosts views and, potentially, sales.

A TikTok Shop spokesperson says Shop sellers will see better results if they spend at least two consecutive hours streaming, similar to the four-, six-, and eight-hour streams that sellers conduct inChina.

Checking in with TikTok’s analytics tools to see which days and hours a seller's followers are most active is also a useful strategy, Insider notes, as it helps sellers make their time demonstrating products on the app more efficient.

“The longer you can stay in, the more people you can bring in to comment and things like that,” said Drew Roder, director of media services at electronics retailer Newegg, which has a logistics partnership with TikTok and offers occasional in-app tech deals.

“If you do less than an hour, you're not really giving the algorithm a chance to find your audience,” Roder told Insider.

Some sellers pointed out that in Douyin, live streams often continue through various hosts trading off time slots, providing their audience with variety, while their hosts get to rest.

TikTok Shop is still fairly new -- officially launching 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 takes off, TikTok will prove for the first time that live stream shopping can thrive on a large scale in the West.

Despite still only being available in a few countries, TikTok Shop, according to Influential's Ryan Detert, is going to grow faster than every other live e-commerce platform in the U.S. because of its built-in audience and the blueprint its following from Douyin.

“TikTok Shop will show a fraction of where it is going to be in the coming years,” says Detert.

“The fourth quarter will be a testing ground for the scale.” Last week, TikTok also announced that it is resuming e-commerce in Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy, by agreeing to spend $840 million on the country’s tech conglomerate GoTo's e-commerce unit.