Set up a live streaming venue
It's clear that TikTok hasn't given up on the U.S. live streaming e-commerce market yet.
According to reports, a person familiar with the matter recently revealedTikTok plans to open a number of offline live broadcast studios in major cities in the United States such as Los Angeles, aiming to provide a more professional live streaming environment for creatorsIn turn, it will promote the development of live streaming e-commerce business in the United States.
It is reported that these new live broadcast venues are expected to have dozens of creators every day, and TikTok will also work directly with some brands or advertising agencies to help these creators promote or get samples from manufacturers. In this way,The live broadcast studio can be used as a medium to connect the links of product selection, warehousing, and live streaming.
TikTok plans to build a live broadcast venue for live streaming Source: IMDB
The source also said that these studios are still in the planning stage, and TikTok is considering whether to charge creators for facility usage fees and other related fees.
The market is sending positive signals
In fact, it is not surprising that TikTok attaches so much importance to the US live e-commerce market.
Previously, McKinsey &Company pointed out in a market research report that live streaming e-commerce has shown strong growth in the U.S. market. In the United States,43% of consumers regularly participate in live shopping, and 42% of American consumers regard live shopping as a form of entertainmentAnd 32% of U.S. users who frequently participate in live shopping earn more than $10,000 a year. In addition, nearly half of U.S. viewers place an order during a live stream, usually in 1-2 quantities.
The income level of live streaming users in the United States is higher Source: McKinsey & Company
It can be seen that although the consumption habit of live shopping has not yet been fully developed, the potential of the live broadcast market in the United States has been initially revealed, so some experts** believe that in 2024, that is, this year, the scale of the live shopping industry in the United States will reach 35 billion US dollars.
And TikTok, which started as a social e-commerce, has also taken advantage of this shareholder trend to gain a firm foothold in the US live broadcast market. The "2023 TikTok Ecological Development" released by Fastmoss shows thatIn 2023, TikTok's global live streaming data will grow across the board, and the live streaming in the United States has shown an explosive growth trend since October.
It's just that the U.S. live streaming market has just released its potential, and many platforms have come to "share the cake", among which whatnot's offensive is the most fierce.
As a young trading platform that was only established in 2019, whatnot innovatively connects niche collectibles with ** live broadcast, meeting the needs of collectors who want to fully understand the product, after accumulating a certain audience, the platform is in full swing to extend its products, including clothing, food, beauty, etc., and the scale of the platform is also expanding.
Up to now, WhatNot has completed at least 7 rounds of financing, of which the amount of Series D financing is as high as 2$600 million. And the Marketplace 100 list released by 16z also shows that WhatNot is the fastest-growing live streaming trading platform in the United States in the past two years.
Whatnot Ranking Changes From 2020 - 2023 **A16Z
It is foreseeable that the continued growth of WhatNot will bring more challenges to the development of TikTok's live streaming e-commerce in the United States. As WhatNot and TikTok continue to verify the possibility of live streaming in the United States, Facebook and Instagram, which previously announced the closure of the live broadcast function, are unlikely to make a comeback, and Amazon, Walmart and other leading e-commerce platforms in the United States will not sit idly by and watch the opportunity to lose. In short, TikTok's live streaming e-commerce business in the United States still has a long way to go.
Author |Cross-border Jun.