Spotted on LinkedIn: TikTok Amazon competition is heating up. That’s judging by these job listings, suggesting TikTok and Chinese parent ByteDance is gunning hard for a piece of Amazon’s pie:
One difference in the TikTok Amazon competition, I suppose, is the “TikTok Shop Voice of Seller” position. Amazon of course gathers metrics about everything, but clearly doesn’t give a toss about what FBA and FBM sellers think. It’s all about customer obsession, eliminating middlemen, and squeezing suppliers to death. See “Frustrated Amazon sellers create vigilante database of bad customers” for more insights into this.
TikTok/ByteDance launched a US shopping experience in 2023 and wants to increase its American e-commerce revenue to as much as $17.5 billion in 2024, according to Bloomberg. The only way that will happen is by taking market share from Amazon.
Another sign on LinkedIn that TikTok is spending heavily: a profile headline from an Amazon employee in counterfeit investigations asking TikTok recruiters not to contact him. Note that counterfeits are already a huge problem on TikTok:
Online marketplaces like Amazon.com Inc., JD.com and Alibaba’s Tmall have long seen sellers hawking counterfeit products at very low prices, combating them with varying degrees of success. Such products deceive customers into paying for something inauthentic and deter brands from selling on the platform that hosts them because it can erode the value of the real product.
ByteDance is learning that what works in the People’s Republic of China in terms of rampant IP theft doesn’t fly in other countries with a strong history of protecting trademarks and copyright. Hiring experienced staff who know how to investigate and terminate black hat third party sellers is key to getting the problem under control.