That’s what SuperOrdinary, a startup that’s worked with brands on social and e-commerce strategy in China and the US, is betting on. TikTok will bolster that wave, SuperOrdinary CEO Julian Reis told Business Insider.
“Market share is going to shift away from traditional channels and more into TikTok in the next five to 10 years,” Reis said.
With a roughly 300-person office in Shanghai, SuperOrdinary has more experience than many of its social-commerce competitors when it comes to porting live-shopping strategies over to the US from China, where live commerce drives hundreds of billions in sales annually.
The company said that since its founding in 2018, it’s helped partners in China sell over 1.1 million orders and generate more than $500 million in sales via 57,000 livestream hours. SuperOrdinary expanded its business to Los Angeles in 2021, adding over two dozen live-streaming studios and acquiring creator monetization startup Fanfix in 2022. The company raised a $58 million Series B in 2023 and now has its sights set on TikTok Shop in the US. It’s working directly with TikTok as an official service provider for Shop brands looking for assistance in areas like livestream production, shop operations, creator affiliate outreach, customer service, and strategy.
“The initiative really was born out of our experience in China,” Reis said. “We have many years of experience building brands on these platforms and we wanted to transfer that knowledge and that experience to help brands in the US achieve their goals on TikTok, which is very complicated to use.”
The company helped beauty brands such as Supergoop and Olaplex get onboarded into shopping programs on Chinese platforms like TikTok’s sister app, Douyin. It’s aiming to replicate that strategy in the US with a handful of e-commerce-focused beauty brands like Milk Makeup, Babor, Byrd Hair, and Never Have I Ever.
SuperOrdinary’s partnership with TikTok comes as the platform has moved past the testing phase of e-commerce with high hopes of becoming a leader in the space by the end of 2024.
E-commerce on TikTok, which launched its Shop marketplace in the US in September after testing for less than a year, is still nascent compared to the live-shopping powerhouse of Douyin, which drove around $200 billion in sales in 2022, The Information reported. TikTok is targeting under $20 billion in sales in the US for 2024, per a Bloomberg report.
There are also cultural differences between the apps’ user bases, as key-opinion leaders, or KOLs, in China serve as shopping guides for consumers in a manner that hasn’t caught on yet with US influencers.
But features that perform well on Douyin often end up on TikTok next, and TikTok is making social shopping and livestream commerce a big focus going forward.
For SuperOrdinary, having experience with both apps and an existing relationship with ByteDance could offer a strategic advantage. But TikTok and Douyin aren’t its only focuses when it comes to live shopping.
“We’re platform agnostic,” Reis said. With rising acquisition costs for direct-to-consumer brands, Reis said that the company’s prerogative is to help brands navigate and sell products where their customers are — whether that is Amazon, TikTok, Temu, or Douyin. Amazon and TikTok are still the most important channels for SuperOrdinary’s brand clients, he added.
Lessons from China
While TikTok has begun accelerating its shopping presence in the US over the past year, SuperOrdinary waited out live shopping in the US market until now.
“When we first came to the US three years ago, a lot of people thought we’d come in with guns blazing and opening up a live-streaming business here,” Reis said.
Several live-shopping bets have popped up since around 2020, like PopShopLive or Meta’s various live-shopping tools, but they haven’t taken off (or in Meta’s case, have been sunsetted).
“We’ve had these smaller platforms that have been launched over the years, independent apps focusing on either collectibles or some on beauty, but the consumer wasn’t spending time there,” Reis said. “The consumers were spending on these social platforms, which were built for e-commerce and TikTok is the first platform that was built for e-commerce, in our opinion.”
In China, Douyin “took market share away from the large other platforms,” Reis said. “We’re in for a similar transition in the US.”
Reis is “bullish” on TikTok paving the way for live shopping in the US, but he still acknowledged that it won’t look identical to the “rocket-like” rise it’s seen in China and other Asian markets.
“It may not be the same magnitude, just because there are cultural differences, but I do believe that we will start to see a transition into livestreaming as the core competency on the platform,” Reis said. “It will take time.”
On TikTok, shopping is entertainment
There’s a reason live shopping is gaining ground on TikTok: it’s captivating.
“TikTok is all about entertainment,” Reis said. “Live shopping is all about entertainment.”
Take beauty content as an example. Brands have found organic (and planned marketing) success with makeup tutorials or get-ready-with-me videos that make a viewer say in a matter of seconds: I want that.
SuperOrdinary, for the most part, has focused on beauty, health, and wellness brands. Creators making content at home in front of a mirror feels “very natural,” Reis said, and that is in part why this content sells.
“We shouldn’t discount the platform for just being a commerce channel,” Reis added. “Everyone refers to it as the ‘modern-day QVC,’ but I think it’s more than that because people just need to be entertained. The attention spans of everyone’s got a lot shorter too.”
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