Shopify Partners TikTok As It Looks for Demand

Shopify, a Canadian  e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems, wants to grow faster. It has already partnered with Facebook to launch a Facebook shopping feature even as Facebook continues to expand its tentacle. This partnership will give Shopify demand which it does not have at scale.

It is what it is: if you have demand, you can venture into anything online. The latest news is that Facebook has gone into gaming. Why not? When you have demand, everything else becomes marginal. Yes, once the foundational fixed cost has been taken care off, building new application layers becomes easy. That is why we have Facebook Shopping, Facebook Local, Facebook Neighborhood….and now Facebook Games. It is building leverageable assets in technology.

Shopify needs demand, and would be further partnering  with TikTok since growing demand does not happen overnight. With this partnership, the ecommerce platform can grow faster: “The partnership will enable Shopify to reach a wider audience of younger people as it pushes for more sales”. Call this infusion: the one million Shopify members will have access to hundreds of millions of TikTok users.

“Today, we’re announcing a first-of-its-kind commerce partnership with TikTok that brings the world’s leading destination for short form video to Shopify’s more than one million merchants. With the TikTok channel for Shopify, merchants can take advantage of TikTok’s global scale to reach new and engaged audiences,” Shopify said in a statement announcing the partnership.

The partnership will enable Shopify to reach a wider audience of younger people as it pushes for more sales. The e-commerce company has over 1 million merchants looking for customers and TikTok has the audience that fits in. The companies said the partnership will eventually expand to include other in-app shopping features.

Under the deal, Shopify merchants are allowed to create, run and optimize their TikTok marketing campaigns directly from the Shopify dashboard by installing the new TikTok channel app from the Shopify App Store. Once installed, merchants will have access to the key functions from TikTok For Business Ads Manager at their disposal.

What is happening here is fundamental: modern digital empires control demand, not necessarily supply. Shopify needs access to demand to thrive. TikTok has demand, and that is why this partnership looks great. I expect Shopify to pay TikTok for this just as Google pays Apple to have its search as default on the Safari browser.

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