A top TikTok shopping exec explains its US growth strategy, from partnering with agencies to building up livestreaming

• TikTok Shop is preparing for the holiday season as it crosses one year since its US launch.
• The company is pushing live shopping, influencer partnerships, and other selling tactics.
• BI spoke with Nico Le Bourgeois, head of US operations, to learn more about its strategy.

TikTok is laser-focused on shopping.

Its e-commerce feature, Shop, which launched in the US about a year ago, has grown steadily as users have become more accustomed to buying products via short videos and livestreams — though some still get the ick from shopping content.

The company has courted a roster of creators to promote products in exchange for a commission on sales. It works with hundreds of agency partners to coordinate live selling sessions and give out free samples to influencers. It has its own logistics business with six US warehouses, and is in the early stages of connecting creators with manufacturers to make custom products.

It’s doing all of this because the business opportunity in social shopping could be huge.

Social commerce drives hundreds of billions in sales annually on TikTok’s sister app in China, Douyin. If TikTok can replicate even a fraction of Douyin’s e-commerce prowess in the US, it would be a money-making machine.

In a Wednesday interview with Business Insider at a company event in New York, TikTok Shop’s head of US operations Nico Le Bourgeois talked about how the company plans to get more US consumers to embrace live shopping, how he thinks about the role of influencers in e-commerce, and what the company hopes will happen on Shop this holiday season.

Prior to joining TikTok, Le Bourgeois spent nine years at Amazon where he oversaw its seller marketplace and other parts of its retail operations.

Below are excerpts from that conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity:

When you think about this holiday season, what does success look like?

Obviously, we want to sell a lot. There’s a lot of businesses that rely on us for Q4, so we want to make them proud. I think more importantly, we want to make sure that we are true to our mission of product discovery. We want people to discover new products. To be surprised. To feel like shopping can be different. And as a part of that, if we can have many customers shop in live and realize that this is really cool, I think we will have done a good job.

How do you think about introducing TikTok users to live shopping?

It’s a lot of work. We have to build a complete ecosystem from scratch with the right agencies, the right brands. Not everybody’s ready for it. We have to educate customers.

I know that you have some studios that your partners can use to do live selling. Not everyone can set up a studio to participate, but how important is the look?

Retail is detail, and I would say that applies to live, too. There’s a lot of details to be very good at live shows, starting with quality. The cameras, the studio, the environment, selecting the products, et cetera. We have studios in LA. We have studios in Seattle. We have studios in New York. There’s a lot of agencies now having built their own capabilities, so we are not short of capability for live shows now in the US.

I am really curious about this idea of the TikTok Shop creator … How do you think about working with that cohort and using them to help grow the platform?

When we started, there weren’t millions of creators doing shopping content. People came, they were interested, they came naturally, and they registered, and step by step, they learned how to do it. We also brought a lot more products. So we have this flywheel of the more creators you have, the more products you have, and the more creators are excited.

You find people that you never knew they could actually be great sellers on TikTok. They find their career. They find their thing, and they become huge.

You have agency partners that help with creators, help with sellers. How do you feel about that strategy? Is that going to continue to be a focus?

Yeah, it’s an amazing strategy and big focus for us. This week, I was in New York for the whole week meeting a lot of partners. Decentralizing and having independent companies working with us in partnership fosters so much creativity and amazing ideas that our team could not have. I feel so energized by the model.

When you think about competitor set, do you think of yourself more in the category of like a Walmart, Amazon, Shopify? Where do you place yourself?

We think we have a unique positioning. If we come in the US to fight against Amazon, I don’t think it’s going to work. So we are deeply focused on product discovery, which is a completely different way of shopping. Customers don’t search, they naturally go on TikTok to be entertained, and then they find products that at some point they find interesting, useful, and then they end up buying it. So they see it. They like it. They buy it. That’s what we are trying to develop.

Are you planning to do more expansion on the logistics side?

Yeah. It’s actually super important for us.

We want to be fun. But we also know that you need to get delivered to pretty fast. We need to have a solid experience. So, as we scale, we’re investing more there.

How do you think about international coordination? Are you working a lot with folks in other markets?

We are heads down in the US developing the business, bringing more brands, and I think we’re trying to develop a real US-centric business. Probably UK is going to be different. China is very different.

If the law to ban or divest TikTok goes through, I think January 19th is the deadline unless something happens in the courts, is this on your mind at all? Does it affect investment at all?

For us, we’re so much into our mission to develop discovery e-commerce. Just focused on everybody — the teams, the creators, the brands. Everybody is focused on developing the business.