• by Colin Kirkland , November 14, 2024

Along with recent attempts to boost its livestream shopping initiative with holiday deals, TikTok has filed two recent U.S. trademarks that aim to capitalize on its search popularity, opening its advertising business up to new opportunities in the social media space, including restaurants, retail, travel, and more.

According to a report by Semafor, one of TikTok's trademarks is for “TikTok Go,” which will promote “restaurants, retail businesses, the travel industry, and other online and offline businesses,” while “promising to create marketing and advertising materials, develop financial projections to evaluate marketing investments, and provide marketing advisory and technical consulting, among other functions.”

The company's second filing involves a service called “TikTok PayLater,” which Semafor says is designed to allow customers using TikTok Shop “to split their payments into monthly installments.”

The filing itself describes the buy-now-pay-later service as a software “for managing, reporting, and reconciling payment transactions made online and offline,” which aligns with the company's in-app shopping push, ultimately giving its ecommerce customers more buying functions, such as handling physical credit or debit card readers and third-party apps.

Both trademark filings describe TikTok Go and TikTok PayLater as mobile apps separate from the main TikTok social app.

Preparing to institute an enhanced payment system in the U.S. shows that TikTok is confident about its position in the region, despite the possibility that the platform will be banned or sold-off in January, cutting off over 100 million active users.

Regardless, it is still uncertain whether U.S. consumers will adopt livestream shopping like they have in Asian markets.

For reference, TikTok's Chinese sister app Douyin generated over $500 billion in product sales last year, which far surpasses TikTok's growing intake.