• TikTok is wooing brands and creators to try its in-app shopping feature, Shop.
• In June, TikTok UK hosted an online summit detailing how to get started on Shop and best practices.
• Read the full 9-page document TikTok shared after the summit with information about Shop.

TikTok wants everyone to hop onto the “shoppertainment” train.

“Shoppertainment” — a portmanteau of “shopping” and “entertainment” — is the future of commerce, the platform argued during an online summit it hosted in mid-June. Entertaining content is what drives customers to purchase. TikTok referenced the hashtag #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt, which had almost 64 billion views as of July 28.

Through TikTok Shop, the platform has introduced a way for brands to sell products and for users to buy them directly on the app, without going to third-party websites.

During the summit, called “Discover, Sell, Grow,” key TikTok execs, execs from brands, creators, and business owners discussed how to get started on Shop, how to use ads on TikTok, and best practices on what type of content sells best.

“Our community bring their creativity every day to produce content on our platform that is playful and fun, and all underpinned by entertainment,” said Kris Boger, the UK general manager for global business solutions. “We like to sometimes think of it as the last sunny corner of the internet. People become excited, they become curious, and they become open to transact.”

TikTok leadership has big plans for shopping. The company aims to gross $20 billion in merchandise sales this year, more than four times the 2022 sales figures, Bloomberg reported. That would largely rely on the rapid growth of Shop in Southeast Asia, where it was introduced in 2021.

In Western markets, the rollout has been bumpy. In the UK, where Shop was also launched in 2021, the company faced backlash and an exodus of employees for its “aggressive corporate ethos,” and scratched plans for further expansion of Shop in Europe after a tepid reaction from consumers, the FT reported. 

This year, the platform appears determined to make Shop work in the West. It launched in the US in November, and has attempted to woo sellers with discounts and subsidized shipping. Creators, meanwhile, are being offered cash bonuses, freebies, and other perks for promoting TikTok Shop products.

In the UK, TikTok continues to aggressively pursue sellers, and offering “solutions designed with complex businesses in mind,” Patrick Nommensen, UK e-commerce general manager, told Insider in June. The “Discover, Sell, Grow” summit was part of this effort.

TikTok is also planning to move deeper into the e-commerce stack by storing and selling made-in-China goods in the US, in a program similar to Amazon’s “Sold by Amazon” initiative, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. TikTok has already experimented in this direction with “Trendy Beat,” an Amazon-like feed selling mostly whitelabeled Chinese products currently available in the UK.

Here’s the 9-page document TikTok shared after the summit in mid-June: