• by Colin Kirkland , December 13, 2024

Following major Black Friday sales, TikTok Shop is furthering its push of livestream social ecommerce in the U.S. by offering shopping credits to users for engaging with the platform and for inviting friends to join the app.

According to a recent report by Bloomberg, “TikTok users recently began seeing a new "limited time offer," which compensates them in the form of TikTok Shop credits,” with the promotions “appearing on TikTokers' ‘For You’ page.”

Effectively, the company's rewards program is offering users up to hundreds of dollars per day for helping expand the app's user base and for shopping in-stream -- a shopping method that is still somewhat foreign to U.S. consumers, compared to consumers in Asian regions where TikTok's sister app Douyin amasses hundreds of billions of dollars in product sales per year.

However, despite last year's poor U.S. sales numbers, TikTok Shop has begun to capture U.S. users' attention, driving over $100 million in Black Friday sales -- reflecting a 3x increase year-over-year. During the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend, the platform also saw a 165% increase in shoppers year-over-year, with a third of all purchases made during the company's three-week-long holiday shopping campaign going to small and medium-sized businesses.

TikTok is building off this holiday-season momentum when consumers are most likely to seek out products on social media.

In fact, the company's limited time offer resembles a rewards program that it offered in Europe earlier this year. But paying European users to engage with the app violated the Digital Services Act (DSA) and was forced to cease in August.

While the new rewards program seems to adhere to U.S. laws, the China-owned company is still facing a looming ban in the region, which could see its extinction by January 19th, cutting off access to over 170 million American users.

The U.S. government appears to be set on banning the app, with the Department of Justice recently urging a federal appellate court to reject TikTok's emergency request to block the law. But hope for the platform's survival in the U.S. resides in president-elect Donald Trump's prior promise that he would save the app, and Forrester's recent prediction that the app won't be banned due to TikTok's thriving creator economy, and the threat of a Meta monopoly.

If Forrester's prediction is correct, TikTok Shop may be poised to upend the current ecommerce sector, competing directly with major online retailers like Amazon, especially as the platform continues to expand internationally.