TikTok has started shilling products for sale using videos that have nothing to do with shopping, as it continues its charge into e-commerce.
The company is using artificial intelligence to scan videos, identify items, and encourage users to buy similar products through its e-commerce marketplace, TikTok Shop. While TikTok has previously allowed creators to tag products in videos as part of its affiliate program, this new feature currently occurs without notifying the creator — and without the promise of a commission on sales their video helps drive.
A TikTok spokesperson said it’s an early-stage experiment with limited availability to a small subset of users in the US and UK, and that it may never officially launch. The company uses machine-object detection to identify products in videos and suggest similar product categories, they said.
Insider first discovered the feature on Sunday when a shopping button appeared on a video uploaded by an Insider reporter.
In the video, the reporter, Shriya Bhattacharya, was at a Diwali event and wearing a lehenga, a South Asian outfit featuring a blouse, skirt, and a dupatta, or long scarf. She used hashtags including #lehenga, #Diwali, and #diwaliglam. The video surfaced in another Insider reporter’s For You feed along with a call-to-action to find “more wedding dresses on TikTok Shop” with a “Shop now” button that opens into the app’s Shop tab. The button clicked to the Shop home page, not a specific page of wedding dresses.
TikTok did not inform Bhattacharya that her video would be used to sell items in Shop.
She said that while she was not at a wedding in the video, the off-white lehenga she wore could reasonably be worn by a bride, which may explain why TikTok’s system believed it was a wedding dress.
A search for “wedding dresses” in TikTok Shop reveals a variety of bridal gowns, including a “Sparkling Off-Shoulder Crystal Sequined Tulle Ball Gown Wedding Dress” for $973.99 and a “2 in 1 Sparkly Wedding Dress” available for between $1,650 and $1,750.
The arrival of shopping buttons on regular TikTok videos shows how deeply the company is integrating e-commerce into the app’s overall user experience. The company has been on an all-out blitz in recent months to make shopping take off — offering shipping deals and other discounts to sellers, paying bonuses to influencers who add affiliate links, and launching a series of Black Friday and Cyber Monday incentives for merchants.
TikTok isn’t the only social app to offer product tags in photos and videos. YouTube and Instagram have similar tagging features for users, and companies like Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Google have used machine learning to visually identify products in order to better recommend purchases to users. A bride or groom might use Pinterest as a mood board for wedding planning, for example.
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