First Black Friday with TikTok Shop: how social e-commerce works

The Black Friday week this year brings with it a novelty: the possibility for Italian users to shop onTiktok Shop without leaving the entertainment app, transforming 'curiosity into immediate purchase', as the campaign claim goes. The shop, launched in Italy on 31 March last, has over 8,000 active sellers and presents itself not only as an innovative solution for online shopping, but also as a virtual place where creators and brands can develop their businesses and where small and very small businesses can find space to sell their products directly, with zero entry costs and paying a commission on sales.

Shopping "based on entertainment, trust and direct connection between the seller and the buyer" is what TikTok's Black Friday promises, which will run on the platform until 1 December. Fashion, beauty and electronics are the categories at the centre of the activity of creators and sellers who, through videos and live shopping sessions, will show products in action, explaining how they are used and telling their story and value. The live events on TikTok Shop will be attended by creators and brands among the most popular on the platform, including New Martina, Nonna Silvi and Moero who will present their products and promotions live. But the focus is also on supporting local businesses, with brands such as Fratelli Guzzini and AllyCore that will share stories, curiosities and passion online with the community. It will be the brand owners themselves, in the first person, who will tell the value of their products, "transforming every purchase into an experience and concrete support for Italian entrepreneurship," explain TikTok.

After Black Friday, for sellers large and small, creators and brands TikTok Shop remains a space where they can develop their business. But how does it work? We asked Massimo Rocchelli, Operations Lead of TikTok Shop Italia, who first of all explained how the platform - with 200,000 active sellers in the UK and 15 million worldwide - is a tool "that allows you to customise your approach, because a big brand has certain challenges and a small seller has others". And if for big names "the challenge may be to understand how to speak the language of TikTok, which is more authentic and with fewer filters than other platforms," says Rocchelli, "for small brands it is a great opportunity to show themselves and go viral, because it is a platform where users come to discover. Rocchelli recounts the case of "small brands that from the very first day on the shop have generated more than a thousand orders in a day, and this means a thousand parcels to be made", i.e. a potential problem for small businesses that are not structured. And this is why TikTok Shop also offers companies and sellers the possibility of using their own couriers at no extra cost, while in some countries - Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom, but not yet in Italy - the platform also manages the warehouse, thus stocking products.

What are the requirements for selling on TikTok Shop? And the costs? Rocchelli explains that it is sufficient to have a VAT number that is registered with the Chamber of Commerce to create a free account on Tiktok Shop. After passing a check on the documents and the quality and conformity of the products that you want to sell, you can go online and upload the articles 'just like in a shop that, however, compared to a physical store has potentially 23.9 million users/customers,' the TikTok manager emphasises. Once online, one can start selling products through different channels: video and live, virtual brand shop and marketplace, paying TikTok Shop a 5% percentage of sales. To help the business grow, Rocchelli goes on to explain, there are advertising tools (to give more visibility to live broadcasts and videos, for example, also with the use of Ai) and affiliation with established creators: it is the platform that puts the brands in contact with the creators and these in turn will then receive a percentage of sales. In order to 'contribute to the development of Italian companies,' adds Rocchelli, 'we have also recently launched the Soar (Supporting our Artisans and Retailers) programme, and to give substance to this commitment, in Italy we collaborate with Talent Garden, a reference reality in the field of digital training and innovation.