TikTok threat looms large over Amazon with $20 billion shopping pilot

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Inside a shophouse in Northeast Jakarta, dozens of salespeople take turns peddling cosmetics, contact lenses and hair accessories. A woman helps a potential customer choose the right shade of lipstick for her skin tone, while a man yells out the latest markdown on vitamin tablets. 

This is no raucous flea market. It's a livestreamed marketplace within TikTok, and a gold rush for entrepreneurs seeking fortunes on the world's most popular short-video app. For the company, best known for viral dance challenges and owned by China's ByteDance Ltd., TikTok Shop is its fastest-growing feature with a burgeoning fan base in Southeast Asia.

Its success in the region is crucial for TikTok as it faces a possible ban in the US on national security concerns. It also provides the company a template to take on Amazon.com Inc. in a way that no social media company has attempted before, provided it's allowed to keep operating in the US.

Indonesia was the first market for TikTok Shop and is still its biggest, helped by a young, mobile-savvy population that's embraced the combination of short videos and in-app shopping since its 2021 launch. TikTok Shop is expected to hit $20 billion in gross merchandise value by the end of this year, quadrupling from a year earlier. 

If it can sustain that momentum, analysts say, it could revamp a company whose mainstay video platform is already luring consumers and advertisers away from Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google. 

Hank Wang, who manages a cast of around 50 livestreaming hosts at the bustling Jakarta shophouse, believes it has the power to transform the retail industry and to turn entrepreneurs like him into the next e-commerce barons.  

“I want to become the next Forrest Li,” said the