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TikTok to expand e-commerce to the US and Brazil in search of new revenue despite political scrutiny from Washington

  • The short video platform has accelerated its expansion plans for TikTok Shop in the Americas after finding success in Southeast Asia
  • The ByteDance-owned business has posted several related positions in Seattle, where it will challenge Amazon on its home turf as it seeks to turn a profit

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The TikTok app logo picture in Tokyo on September 28, 2020. Photo: AP
Coco Fengin Beijing
TikTok is planning to expand its e-commerce business to the US and Brazil as it seeks new sources of revenue and user growth amid persistent political scrutiny over its ties to China.
The viral short video platform, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, has posted more than 300 related jobs on LinkedIn over the past week, including positions for recommendation algorithm engineers, advertising merchant product managers, and heads of its household and make-up goods categories.

“With more than 1 billion loyal users globally, we believe TikTok is an ideal platform to deliver a brand new and better e-commerce experience to our users,” the company said in some of its job posts. “We are looking for passionate and talented people to join our e-commerce operations team in the US.”

About 100 of the positions are based in Seattle, where online shopping giant Amazon.com is based. Some of the jobs require knowledge of fulfilment warehousing, parcel sorting and courier delivery.

TikTok has also reportedly been planning to build out its own product fulfilment centres in the US, according to an Axios report last week, which would give it control of another element of its e-commerce supply chain and open up another front in its challenge to Amazon.

TikTok Shop, a marketplace built into the TikTok app that facilitates transactions while users watch short videos and live streams, has already launched in the UK and six Southeast Asian countries, including Singapore and Indonesia. The Americas are next in the expansion plans as TikTok focuses more of its attention on the new service.

The launch for the US is planned by the end of the year and for Brazil by the first half of 2023, an accelerated timeline over its previous plan to launch in the South American country in the latter half, Chinese media LatePost reported.

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