TikTok passed 1 billion active users within five years, and Shopify's TikTok integration lets merchants tag products in videos and send viewers straight to checkout. Connect Shopify to a 3PL like Zendbox and those orders are picked, packed and shipped automatically, however well your promotions perform.
That’s not completely without blame, of course. Social media is a fickle beast, and platforms have come and gone, taking vast investment with them.
But the figures speak for themselves. TikTok has recently passed 1 billion active users, which is remarkable given that it was released just 5 years ago in 2016.
Facebook took eight years to reach the same milestone, and Twitter – despite its huge global influence – still only has about 330 million users 15 years after launch, which means it’s likely it will never get to a billion.
For the uninitiated, it’s worth covering the basics of TikTok. Essentially, it’s a video sharing platform, where videos are always in portrait mode, and are between 15 seconds and 3 minutes in duration. That has made it the perfect medium for the smartphone generation – you can view videos with your phone in its normal upright position, and you know you’re never going to eat up all your mobile data because videos are generally short, and at average resolution (by 2021 standards).
In their streams, users will sometimes encounter paid ads. And that’s where we come in.
There’s one eCommerce platform that certainly hasn’t missed the opportunity to monopolise on TikTok’s incredible reach, and that’s Shopify. In collaboration with TikTok, Shopify has worked on a tool for TikTok For Business account-holders to get their ads onto the streams of users in the simplest, most integrated way possible.
They’ll get a special tab in their TikTok accounts that lets them link directly to their storefronts, so that products are automatically synced, giving them a mini-storefront to be displayed on users’ phones.
The upshot is that merchants who make creative, innovative and entertaining videos can dramatically increase their sales opportunities by tagging products that they are promoting (whether they display them or not), so users can be directed straight to the checkout page.
The medium looks natural and doesn’t interfere with users’ streams like some advertising methods can – it’s a direct channel for people who already have followers, or are building a following, to sell their wares.
Influencers are already using the system, and by all accounts are loving the effects. But you don’t have to be Kylie Jenner to sell your products on the platform – niche markets work particularly well when there’s such an enormous number of potential viewers.
So if you’ve already got a TikTok profile and you’re selling items online via Shopify, you’ve now got a match made in heaven – a simple, intuitive and unobtrusive way to easily allow customers to buy. And if people already love your work, they might even start making token purchases as a kind of tip to keep you going. It’s a real win-win for online retailers.
So, how does the process work for the average TikTok user looking to make a purchase from the platform?
The beauty of this process is that you can create the TikTok ads, view analytics and ad data, sell your items on Shopify and Zendbox will take care of your orders within ZendPortal. No more hopping around multiple platforms. This is seamless integration for modern eCommerce retailers.
To put it simply, third-party logistics is where you hand all your shipping and storage responsibilities to a separate company, rather than storing your stock yourself and individually shipping sold items (or, more likely, handing them to a professional courier to ship).
At Zendbox, our warehousing, packaging, labelling and shipping is all set up to service eCommerce businesses to dramatically shorten the time between a customer clicking the Buy button and the courier ringing the doorbell. As a vendor, all you need to do is ensure there is a stock of products in our fulfilment centres. If you’re doing a promotion, you can add more stock, or you can just keep your shelves full for average demand.
Once you make a sale, you can either manually set the fulfilment in motion by logging into Zendbox and making the order, or you can integrate an automated fulfilment system into your eCommerce platform – in this case, Shopify – to deal with the transaction without you having to lift a finger. The product is retrieved from storage, packaged, labelled and shipped straight away.
Zendbox has a suite of tools to easily integrate your Shopify store with Zendbox fulfilment service, so you don’t need to know anything about coding, payment security or shipping to get started. Since the typical Shopify merchant tends to use the platform for this very reason, it’s a logical next step to add in fulfilment. Once your TikTok sales start exceeding your capacity to manually process them, it’s great to know that you’ll be able to deal with shipping however successful your promotions are.
And with one billion users on TikTok, that time could come sooner than you think.
Find out more about Zendbox here, and learn about the process of getting your stock into your customers’ hands.
From video to doorstep in four connected stages.
Users see your content and targeted ads through the TikTok algorithm as part of their normal stream.
Shopify's TikTok tab syncs your products, so tagged items send viewers straight to checkout.
Integrate Shopify with Zendbox so each order flows into ZendPortal automatically, without manual processing.
The product is retrieved from storage, packed, labelled and shipped straight away.
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