Black Friday has ended, and TikTok Shop is charging ahead.

Text | Lan Jie

Editor | Qiao Qian

Recently, heavy snow has fallen on the streets of New York, USA, and the bustling streets are already filled with Christmas decorations dominated by red and green. Thanksgiving has just ended, and Christmas is approaching. The period between the two festivals has become an excellent shopping season, which is the origin of the big promotion festival "Black Friday and Cyber Monday". On December 3, the annual "Black Friday and Cyber Monday" in Europe and the US has come to an end.

Although the commercial streets in New York are still crowded with people, more shopping behaviors are moving online. According to the report of the retail data analysis platform Mastercard Spending Pulse, the overall retail sales in the US on Black Friday increased by 3.4% this year, of which online sales increased by 14.6%, while in-store consumption increased by only 0.7%.

At the same time, TikTok, with 170 million monthly active users, has an increasingly strong competitiveness in the e-commerce industry. On November 29 local time, a poster released by TikTok Shop showed that on the day of "Black Friday", its overall sales in the US market exceeded 100 million US dollars, and the number of shoppers attracted between "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday" also increased by 165% year-on-year.

The Black Friday promotion of TikTok Shop started on November 14 and lasted for 19 days until December 3, which is much longer than local e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and also more than a week earlier than last year.

Traffic is still the absolute competitiveness

Akina is an employee responsible for influencer marketing at a local smart home company in the US. After TikTok Shop officially landed in the US region, she began to be responsible for the connection and placement of influencers on the platform. Before Black Friday, Akina had already started to lay out the mid-level influencers on the platform, and then carried out traffic investment during Black Friday to increase the conversion rate.

Taking influencer marketing as the focus and laying out the mid-level influencers before the big promotion node has become a common strategy for most TikTok Shop merchants. During Black Friday, against the background that both the platform and merchants have increased the traffic investment, the click-through rate and conversion rate of the influencer带货 videos cooperated by Akina have increased significantly.

During the Q1 - Q3 period, the conversion rate of several hundred videos laid by Akina was only about 10%, "equivalent to cooperating with 100 influencers, and only 10 will make orders." However, during Black Friday, this number climbed to 30% - 40%, and drove the ROI of her products to rise to 8%, almost doubling compared to usual.

Mr. Shen, a partner of a cross-border e-commerce company, also benefited from the traffic dividend. During Black Friday, he also achieved an increase in ROI - from the usual 17% - 20% to 25% - by increasing the traffic investment and conducting 24-hour non-stop live broadcasts. According to him, for some categories supported by the platform, such as health products, the profit margin can reach 300%, and the return rate is only 2% - 5%. Of course, the extremely low return rate is also related to the underdeveloped local logistics, long links and high costs.

Compared with Akina's company, which is already a mature local brand, Mr. Shen's cross-border company mainly sells fast-moving consumer goods, and sells whatever category sells well. Therefore, its sales are more dependent on traffic investment, and the increase in ROI is relatively limited.

During Black Friday, TikTok Shop did launch a package of traffic dividend policies, including but not limited to jointly promoting with the local mainstream media and top stars in the US; setting up modules such as the landing page of the big promotion zone, the flash sale channel and the exclusive low - price label for Black Friday; and promoting live broadcasts, etc.

Compared with short - video带货, the development of live - streaming content on the platform is still in its infancy. According to the survey data of Statista, the estimated sales of live - streaming e - commerce in the US in 2023 will reach 50 billion US dollars, and by 2026, this data may increase by nearly 40%. Correspondingly, TikTok Shop also strongly supported live - streaming带货 during this Black Friday, providing traffic subsidies and large discount coupons for live - streaming rooms, and the official will continue to weight and top the list for live - streaming.

It is precisely because the platform's traffic is attractive enough that Mr. Shen's cross - border e - commerce company has now completed the platform migration from Amazon to TikTok Shop. In his account, Amazon relies more and more on traffic investment, and the cost of traffic investment is constantly rising. Finally, the calculated profit may only be 20%. In contrast, on TikTok Shop, the profit of his store in the US region can reach more than 40%, " Usually, relying only on natural traffic, there is no problem in making orders."

Mr. Shen is also recruiting "partners" recently. He believes that the traffic of TikTok, especially the traffic of popular products, is difficult for a single store to consume, which requires more people to operate more stores, "It's the same reason as Xiao Yang Ge. He brings up the popularity of the product category, and those who make slices can also share the cake."

During Black Friday, the strategy of merchants on TikTok Shop is still "winning by quantity".

Akina's company already has a mature online sales channel, that is, the Amazon store and the independent website. For her, TikTok Shop is the cheapest among all the company's online channels. During Black Friday, the products with a customer unit price of more than 400 US dollars on their independent website have been discounted to more than 300 US dollars on TikTok. In addition, at the early stage of traffic investment during Black Friday, they actively reduced the ROI to 5% to increase the quantity, and finally achieved a result of 6% - 8%.

TikTok Shop, Betting on Black Friday

Unlike Mr. Shen and Akina who achieved a doubling of ROI during Black Friday, many merchants are complaining bitterly because of the increasing number of account bans.

A small cross - border merchant said that in the past month, more than 100 of her accounts were "dead". Another merchant directly stated during the peak of Black Friday that he was "quitting" and asked around if there were bosses willing to buy the tens of thousands of accounts in his hand at four yuan each.

Most of these merchants are small or even individual merchants. They buy accounts and carry videos to sell goods cross - border in China, and their mentality is to make a profit and leave.

Professional terms in papers such as "duplicate checking" and "duplicate removal" have become the argot of these small merchants. These terms refer to how to reduce the duplicate rate through re - editing techniques in the process of carrying videos to escape the platform's current limiting and account banning. Therefore, the content shared by these accounts is extremely unfavorable to the platform ecology.

However, such mentality and methods are increasingly not allowed by the platform, and TikTok Shop is strengthening its compliance efforts.

In a recent sharing by a cross - border service provider, if an individual wants to start doing TikTok Shop in the US region, they need to first master a document of about 30,000 words and more than 150 pages, more than half of which is about how to avoid account bans, including how to flash the phone, prevent the platform from tracking the location, and how to edit videos without being detected for plagiarism, etc.

But more often, account bans come unexpectedly, and only the accounts of local stores and the reported white accounts (accounts added to the platform's white list, which are more compliant and receive more support) are the safest. Correspondingly, individual merchants need to pay several thousand yuan to buy a reported white account, and "it is difficult to find one account".

For eligible merchants, TikTok Shop is accelerating recruitment before Black Friday.

In November this year, TikTok's cross - border store in the US region updated its settlement policy. Merchants can apply to open a store as long as they have local stocking conditions and a business license, and are no longer required to provide an operating certificate of a third - party e - commerce platform.

Also in November, TikTok allowed some creators to add third - party shopping links to their creative content, including Amazon, Walmart, CJ, etc. Specifically, this new feature allows creators to directly place shopping links at the top of the comments of TikTok posts. Currently, this feature is still in the testing stage.

In addition, not long ago, TikTok and Lemon8 launched further integration. After the integration, users can directly access Lemon8 through TikTok. This means that TikTok, which has always been the traffic generator of Lemon8, has received traffic feedback from the former. However, according to the feedback from some merchants, the monetization value of Lemon8 is still uncertain, and they are still in a wait - and - see state.

Looking back at the various efforts of TikTok Shop, it is not difficult to see that this Black Friday promotion is of great significance to TikTok's e - commerce.

On the one hand, the progress of achieving the GMV target set by TikTok Shop for the US region is not ideal.

At the end of 2023, according to an exclusive report by 36Kr, TikTok e - commerce set a GMV target of 50 billion US dollars in 2024. At the same time, since the launch of TikTok Shop in the US region last year, the US has become a new growth area for TikTok e - commerce, and it is expected to contribute more than half of the GMV.

At the beginning of this year, according to a report by Bloomberg, the annual GMV target of TikTok Shop in the US region is 17.5 billion. In the first few months of this year, the GMV high point of TikTok Shop in the US region was 793 million US dollars in October. To some extent, the GMV pressure of the platform this year is almost all given to the end of the year.

On the other hand, for TikTok, the ban crisis hovering over its head still exists.

Even if Trump successfully became the new President of the United States in the just - ended US general election and expressed in his response to the media that he would fulfill the promise not to ban TikTok, the crisis still exists. The appeal result of TikTok has not yet been determined, and its final divestiture time happens to be the day before Trump takes office, not to mention that Trump's promise is highly uncertain.

Faced with these, one of the few measures that TikTok can take is to strengthen itself.

Whether TikTok can lift the ban crisis or whether it can achieve the GMV target of e - commerce this year is no longer a concern for merchants - local merchants usually do not All In TikTok Shop, and Amazon and independent websites are still their main e - commerce channels; for those cross - border sellers who want to take advantage of the traffic dividend to make a big profit, the key is whether they can fully enjoy the traffic dividend before the crisis really arrives.

In the communication with the above - mentioned TikTok Shop service provider, 36Kr asked about the related issues of the ban, and she said directly, "If you are worried about these, then you are not suitable for doing the US region."