TikTok is advising merchants to go live for a minimum of two hours at a time when selling products via its e-commerce platform, Shop, a company spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider.
It also directs sellers to stream “regularly,” post videos teasing upcoming livestreams, and use the app’s analytics tools to identify the days and hours when their followers are most active, per documentation the company shares with Shop merchants.
Livestreams are a key way merchants promote products and drive sales through TikTok Shop, which the company has put its full weight behind growing in the US over the last year.
A longer stream means more opportunities to draw in viewers and potentially get picked up by TikTok’s algorithm, two sellers told BI.
“The longer you can stay in, the more people you can bring in to comment and things like that,” said Drew Roder, director of media services at electronics retailer Newegg, which sells items like Xbox controllers and Anker headphones on TikTok and also has a logistics partnership with the company.
Newegg typically goes live for eight hours at a time on TikTok but recently completed a 24-hour stream for Cyber Monday. It shoots its livestreams for TikTok and other platforms at studios in the company’s office in Los Angeles county.
“If you do less than an hour, you’re not really giving the algorithm a chance to find your audience,” Roder said.
Other US sellers are similarly aiming to do eight-hour continuous streams on TikTok in the hope of boosting engagement.
What Goes Around Comes Around, a New York-based store that uses a live-shopping studio to sell pre-owned luxury items like handbags on TikTok, told BI that it currently sticks to the two-hour minimum rule for its livestreams on the app. But it ultimately wants to go live for eight hours at a time by passing off the stream between different hosts.
TikTok’s push for US sellers to create longer livestreams mirrors what platforms and live sellers have done in more mature live-shopping markets like China, where four, six, or eight-hour streams drive hundreds of billions in sales annually.
TikTok’s owner ByteDance operates a similar video app in China called Douyin, and features that perform well on that platform often end up on TikTok next.
“Over in Asia, where we know live shopping really originated, we are seeing that they’ll keep that stream going and it’ll just be a host after host after host,” said Mason Howell, a general manager and livestream host at What Goes Around Comes Around.
Whether TikTok will be able to imitate the live-shopping success of its China-based sister app isn’t clear. The social shopping market is still being developed in the US, and consumer appetite is unproven. It’s still relatively early days for TikTok Shop, which officially launched in the US in September but began testing a little over a year ago. But the company is already driving meaningful sales for some merchants.
“It’s a platform that will mature quickly,” Roder said.
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