TikTok, a social network owned by China’s Bytedance, has begun testing in-app online purchases across Europe, Bloomberg reported.
The social network has already added a showcase of several brands selling clothes.
By expanding its in-app shopping service, the social network hopes to increase competition in the region with Facebook Inc.’s Instagram. In addition, TikTok plans to emulate the success of Douyin, a TikTok mirror app that targets only Chinese users. In the first year after the launch of online shopping inside Douyin, the application increased revenue by $ 26 billion, the agency writes.
Bytedance plans to increase its e-commerce turnover to $ 185 billion by the time of the company’s planned initial public offering in 2022.
Russian social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, owned by Mail.ru Group, have already added online shopping functions and the ability to create online showcases for sellers to their applications.
At the end of December, the founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, announced that from 2021 the messenger would begin to monetize. The current functions of the messenger will remain free, but there will be new “resource-intensive” and paid functions – for business teams and users with advanced needs, he said. On April 19, the “Code of Durov” publication reported that the Telegram management is going to add direct sales of goods and services in channels and groups to the messenger, and not only with the help of bots, as it was previously implemented.
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