• by Colin Kirkland , October 17, 2024

Looking to boost further engagement around its live-shopping ecosystem, TikTok has partnered with the British Beauty Council, an industry group that advocates for all sectors of the beauty industry in the region. Together, both entities will aim to help UK beauty sellers navigate TikTok Shop.

According to TikTok, a beauty product is sold every two seconds on TikTok Shop, where brands can host live-shopping sessions and collaborate with creators to host live sessions on their behalf to try and stoke interest around their products in real time.

TikTok Shop launched in the U.S. less than a year ago with over 200,000 registered sellers and 100,000 content creators participating in an affiliate program designed to use the blueprint of ByteDance's wildly successful China-based app Douyin to capture consumers' attention and popularize livestream shopping.

Since its launch, beauty brands have had the most luck on the shopping platform, with the ability to run product tutorials and offer viewers deals, bundled offers and freebies in an interactive way.

Over the summer, a report by Dash Hudson and NielsenIQ showed that TikTok Shop had become the ninth-largest beauty and wellness retailer in the US and second-largest in the UK, while AdWeek reported that the platform had far surpassed major department stores, small beauty speciality stores, and direct-to-consumer brands in these regions.

Some major beauty brands have embraced the platform, like L'Oréal Paris, which used TikTok Shop to launch an exclusive new product during a 12-hour livestream event filmed at London's Piccadilly Lights. The beauty company even has a designated TikTok Shop acceleration project manager, Jack Timpany, who will be speaking on an Oct. 24th panel per the platform's British Beauty Council partnership.

The partnership will also provide a new batch of beauty brands tips from Mitchell Halliday, the first merchant to make $1 million in a day on the platform via live sale events – an ecommerce format that garners over $500 billion per year for Douyin, China's version of the app.

Despite its rapid growth over the past year, TikTok only facilitated $3.8 billion in total spending in the app over 2023, nowhere close to matching Douyin's annual revenue. But unlike other social media platforms trying to develop livestream shopping experiences, TikTok Shop already has an ecosystem in place, and has set a daring goal of $17.5 billion in revenue by the end of the year.