How ByteDance Takes on Amazon, Alibaba, Instagram and Shopify Globally

ByteDance is Launching an E-commerce App for Global Buyers

Food for thought about the future of retail.

ByteDance is one of the main companies Beijing will use to spread Chinese influence and especially help Chinese businesses grow internationally. With TikTok reaching the 1 Billion monthly active users milestone, it’s a big step but ByteDance’s real genius is in launching new apps.

Not only is ByteDance the most innovative app maker, they understand app marketing at a scale so far superior to even BigTech companies in the West.

The genius of the founder of ByteDance is not really fully appreciated, but it will be one day.

• TikTok owner ByteDance plans to launch in October an e-commerce app aimed at international online shoppers, Chinese media The Passage reported Thursday.?
• We’ve actually known about this for quite some time. But official news should come soon enough.

Zhang Yiming built ByteDance Ltd. into the world’s most valuable private company via a string of blockbuster apps like TikTok that challenged Facebook and other incumbents on their own turf. His latest target: Alibaba.

With Alibaba under Government scrutiny this is also the perfect timing to do it. This will be the ByteDance Express for Chinese businesses to sell outside of China, if you will.

The venture, if realized, will be Bytedance’s attempt to take on Alibaba’s B2C marketplace AliExpress, which also sells products made in China to people living outside the mainland and was founded in 2010.

ByteDance has seen that its consumer app popularity is the perfect vehicle for E-commence in what is now termed social commerce. TikTok is already better at this than Instagram is, even having less of a head start.

So China dominates social commerce and how video streaming is used to sell goods. Only now a decade or longer is the West adopting QR codes for restaurants menus for example. China has been using QR codes in payments and convenience for consumers for ages.

?Like Alibaba’s B2C platform Ali Express, the new app plans to sell Chinese-made products to global consumers. The move comes after Amazon blocked more than 50,000 Chinese retailers for alleged “suspicious behavior,” such as soliciting fake reviews.

?In the past month or so, Byte’s team has intensively contacted many big sellers in East China, and invited the latter to participate in platform testing. The Chinese Government already has been working closely with ByteDance, since their HQ is in Beijing. They hold a board seat and 1% stake in the company.

Since the beginning of this year, the news that ByteDance will launch an independent e-commerce App has never stopped.?In April of this year, there was news that the Douyin e-commerce team was developing an independent e-commerce app. Next month in October, 2021 this news should finally be confirmed. This on top of the new music streaming app by ByteDance.

With E-commerce ByteDance enters into direct competition with Alibaba and possibly even JD.com and makes Chinese platform technology ecosystem the most competitive in E-commerce by far in the world. Pinduoduo and others already keep things very interesting.

The app is developed by the Shanghai Douyin e-commerce team and is benchmarked against head products such as Taobao or Tmall.?In August, there was news that Douyin Mall was about to become independent.?Earlier news said that Douyin e-commerce company’s GMV in 2020 has exceeded 170 billion yuan.?

In addition,?more than 300 billion transactions have been completed?through live streaming rooms and short videos to?e-commerce platforms such as?Taobao and?Jingdong. If TikTok is able to impact consumer decision making already, this app will clearly be a global success since China’s influence in the future of commerce will depend upon it.

ByteDance will literally be a vehicle of the Chinese State and its incredible business innovation sector. China knows a thing or two about E-commerce, logistics and how to offer convenience and services to consumers in new ways.

Think about it, on December 9, 2020, Bytedance Global CEO Zhang Yiming mentioned in his internal goals recently that in 2021, he will focus on three new business directions for further exploration, including: cross-border e-commerce, To B (enterprise services) And LKP (office hardware package).?Among them, Bytedance’s cross-border e-commerce business is both import and export.

In 2021, TikTok, a subsidiary of ByteDance, has successively opened small shops in Indonesia and the UK, and conducted multiple live broadcasts to bring goods. China’s E-commerce strategy to take on the world is going to get very sophisticated in the 2020s with major influence in South America, South East-Asia, Africa and Europe.

Entering the end of May 2021, it is reported that Douyin E-commerce has made personnel adjustments. Douyin E-commerce has been divided into China and non-China regions for divisional management. Douyin is simply the TikTok of China.

ByteDance knows how to scale a new business and its diversification is already very impressive spanning Ads, gaming and now E-commerce.?ByteDance sold about $26 billion?worth of make-up, clothing and other merchandise in 2020, achieving in its maiden year what Alibaba’s Taobao took six years to accomplish. It’s shooting for?more than $185 billion by 2022. Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese twin, is expected to contribute more than half of the firm’s $40 billion domestic ad sales this year, driven in part by e-commerce.

What if ByteDance could become the Shopify and Spotify of China all in a single year of new apps with the consumer brand appeal of TikTok to go viral and spread global influence of China’s E-commerce products to boost its SMEs and manufacturing sector? JD.com, Alibaba and Pinduoduo are already Titans of the industry. Now ByteDance? It’s hard to over-estimate what China could become here in the future of retail.

ByteDance-owned short video app operator Douyin is moving to build up a vast ecosystem of merchants under its own e-commerce platform. Now with new global app endeavors it’s ready for its next play of social commerce in how China sells to the world. American independent retailers shouldn’t fear Amazon, they should fear China and ByteDance. But how little of this is understood in retail communities in 2021. You just wait.

When you think which one app influences consumer shopping trends the most, it's already TikTok. (It's not YouTube, Instagram or Facebook). TikTok is the GenZ global consumer that generation is bigger and is now gaining consumer spending power.