- TikTok has become a powerhouse among Gen-Z shoppers.
- New data shows it tied with Instagram as the most influential social platform for ecommerce.
TikTok has become a powerhouse among Gen Z, and it's been particularly influential to their shopping decisions, according to a recent survey.
A new report by the ICSC surveyed 1,008 people in the US aged 16 to 26 about shopping platforms and preferences. TikTok tied with Instagram for the top social-media spot, with 45% of respondents "reporting them as influential in their purchasing decisions."
Here was the full breakdown of social platforms:
- TikTok and Instagram: 45%
- YouTube: 38%
- Facebook: 24%
- Snapchat: 17%
- Twitter: 14%
- Reddit: 7%
These findings track with other recent data about TikTok's hold on younger consumers. A November survey from the influencer-marketing company Izea found that Gen-Z and millennial consumers ranked TikTok as the best platform to promote a product with an influencer. It beat out both Instagram and YouTube in that survey.
But despite TikTok's influence in shopping, its own ecommerce efforts have not been a runaway success in the US.
TikTok Shop has been huge in Southeast Asia, and the company wants to "more than quadruple" the size of its ecommerce business to as much as $20 billion in sales this year, Bloomberg reported last week, citing people familiar with the matter.
There's a fundamental problem, however. Much of TikTok's success ecommerce success has come from livestream shopping, which is an enormous market in countries like Indonesia. In the US, in contrast, livestream shopping has yet to take hold.
It's not for lack of trying, as all the major social platforms have attempted to make livestream shopping a habit among US consumers. But they have struggled. Some have even appeared to give up, with Instagram killing its live shopping feature in March.
Still, Patrick Nommensen, the GM of UK ecommerce at TikTok, recently told Insider's Marta Biino that while short-form video was still the primary ecommerce driver for the app, he thought livestream shopping would become dominant over time.
If that view represents the consensus thinking among TikTok executives, they are betting on a huge change in user behavior. There hasn't been much evidence of a turn toward livestream shopping in the US so far.
If TikTok wants to capitalize on its influence among Gen-Z shoppers, it might have to seriously rethink its path to doing so.