Author: Fabian Bern / Source: The Next Web
TikTok’s sudden popularity might’ve taken many by surprise as the app burst out on the social media scene seemingly out of nowhere. But TikTok’s origin is clear, it’s based on its one year-older predecessor, Douyin 抖音 which has over 500 million monthly active users.
New TikTok features often make their debut on Douyin, bringing Chinese successes to the rest of Asia and Western markets.
So by examining the Chinese predecessor, we can get a hint at what TikTok’s future will look like.What’s Douyin?
Douyin launched in September 2016 and, in less than a year, began expanding internationally under the name ‘TikTok’. After becoming one of the most popular social apps in many countries such as India, Japan, South Korea, and Thailand, TikTok entered the West after a merge with Musical.ly in mid 2018.
In China, Douyin grew from 30 million to 250 million daily active users within a year and has been an inspiration for many competitors since. Chinese tech-giants WeChat and Weibo have resorted to replicating some of its effective and addictive features in order to stay competitive.
Douyin periodically launches new features from social commerce to snapchat–like conversations. Many of these initiatives subsequently launched on TikTok after preliminary success in China. Now it is only a matter of time before TikTok fully replicates what Douyin has become today.
How TikTok could transform social commerce to the West
Where Instagram and Snapchat have slowly evolved in enabling companies and influencers to sell on their platform, social commerce is already very common in China. Most major platforms like Douyin, WeChat, and Little Red Book 小红书 enable users to make in-app purchases effortless and efficient. With years of experience, TikTok could be the catalyst for this trend to fully take hold in the West.
Since early last year, Douyin has been offering social commerce in-app. Chinese users with a minimum of ten videos are allowed to start selling on the app, linking products from China’s most popular e-commerce websites — such as JD.com, Tmall, and Taobao (similar to Amazon, Ebay) — to their Douyin store.
It would not be a surprise to see something similar in an Amazon x TikTok collaboration where brands and users are able to sell Amazon…
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