Social Teams Need to Think More Like Retailers: TikTok Shop Is on the Up

Nearly 10,000 products. Microsoft, Dyson, Bose and Oura. All available to buy without leaving TikTok.

Best Buy is coming to TikTok Shop.

The US retailer is due to launch in late October with almost 10,000 products, alongside a creator programme that will allow affiliates to make shoppable content, earn commission and connect their activity back to individual products.

TikTok Shop itself isn't new. But Best Buy joining feels significant because of the kinds of products it sells.

Buying a £12 viral beauty product because you've watched someone rave about it for 45 seconds is one thing. Buying a laptop, wearable, pair of premium headphones or expensive appliance is quite another.

Those are products people research. They compare specifications, watch reviews, ask questions and work out whether paying more for one model is actually worth it.

Increasingly, they're doing all of that on social.

So TikTok Shop isn't just becoming another place to buy things. It's becoming part of the research process that happens before we buy them too.

TikTok wants the whole shopping journey

TikTok has always been very good at creating the I didn't know I wanted that until 30 seconds ago moment.

You see a creator using something. You head to the comments. Someone asks where it's from. Another person says they've had theirs for six months and love it. You search the product. Watch three reviews. Somehow it's now in your basket.

TikTok Shop removes some of the faff from that journey.

Shop Ads are available to advertisers across markets including the UK, Ireland and US, giving brands opportunities to reach shoppers across TikTok's feed, search and shopping experiences.

TikTok can now sit across an increasingly large chunk of the journey from “What's that?” to “Should I get it?” to “Fine, I've bought it.”

For brands, that means social commerce can't just be something the ecommerce team worries about. It's a social strategy question too.

Best Buy makes the creator bit particularly interesting

Imagine you're considering a new pair of headphones. You probably don't need another beautifully lit product shot telling you they have “immersive sound”.

You want somebody to tell you whether they're comfortable after three hours, whether the noise cancelling actually works on a train, whether the microphone makes you sound terrible on Teams and whether spending another £150 gets you anything you'll actually notice.

That's where creators are incredibly useful.

And it's why we think brands need to get much more imaginative about creator affiliate content than “here's the product, here's my discount code, link in bio.” For considered purchases, the opportunity is education. Comparisons. Demonstrations. Reviews. Testing. Tutorials. Long-term use. “Here's what nobody tells you.” “Which one should you actually buy?”

The creator's job isn't necessarily to make someone purchase immediately, but to make the decision easier.

But would you actually buy a £1,000 product on TikTok?

This is where things get a little more complicated.

It's one thing to see a £20 product on your For You Page, decide it looks fun and buy it before you've had time to think too hard about whether you need it.

It's another thing entirely when you're spending hundreds, or potentially thousands, of pounds.

But TikTok Shop is already starting to attract those higher-consideration purchases. Fulfilment provider Spreetail, for example, reported 125% year-on-year TikTok Shop sales growth for pools and spas, with products ranging from around $150 for a pool to roughly $2,000 for a sauna. It also reported 275% growth in outdoor furniture and almost 150% growth in lawn and garden.

So people clearly will spend more on TikTok.

The interesting question is what makes them comfortable enough to do it.

Because if you're about to spend £500 on something you've discovered between a GRWM and a video of somebody's dog, you're probably going to have a few questions.

Is this the official brand? Is the product authentic? Why is this creator recommending it? Will it actually work for me? What happens if it arrives damaged? Can I return it? Is there a warranty? Would I feel safer buying it somewhere else?

TikTok can create desire incredibly quickly. Premium brands then need to turn that desire into confidence.

Premium doesn't have to mean polished

This is where we'd be careful about how premium brands interpret “building trust”. It doesn't mean taking everything that makes TikTok feel like TikTok and replacing it with a glossy TV ad.

In fact, that could have the opposite effect. Trust on social comes from proof.

It comes from seeing the product properly. Watching someone use it in a real environment. Hearing what they like and what they don't. Understanding the difference between models. Seeing what it looks like after three months rather than three minutes.

For premium brands, creator content should help answer the questions standing between “I want that” and “I'm comfortable spending that much on it.”

That might mean a 30-day creator review rather than an unboxing. A comparison between two models rather than a product showcase. Showing the actual dimensions of a sofa in someone's living room. Demonstrating how difficult a product is to assemble. Explaining who should buy the cheaper version and who would actually benefit from upgrading.

Sometimes, saying “this isn't for you if...” could be more persuasive than another creator telling everyone they need it. Credible recommendations need to feel like recommendations, not commission scripts.

Trust doesn't stop with the creator

The creator can do a brilliant job and still lose the sale if everything somebody sees afterwards makes them nervous.

Research involving 717 Gen Z TikTok Shop users found that both cognitive trust, whether someone sees the seller as capable, reliable and legitimate, and emotional trust, built through interaction and perceived care, significantly influence purchase intention.

In the same research, 93.33% said they were more inclined to shop from sellers displaying trust attributes such as verified accounts and well-reviewed products.

For a premium brand, those aren't nice-to-haves.

Your official presence needs to look and feel official. Verification, reviews, recognisable branding, detailed product information matters and customer service all mater. And, perhaps less excitingly for the social team, delivery and returns matter too.

If I'm spending £30, I might take a chance.

If I'm spending £1,000, I want to know who's delivering it, when it's arriving, what happens if something goes wrong and whether I'm going to spend the next six weeks arguing with a chatbot about a refund.

Those things aren't sitting neatly outside the marketing funnel anymore. They're part of the marketing.

And returns are the bit brands shouldn't ignore

There's a slightly uncomfortable side to making social commerce incredibly easy.

Sometimes people buy things they aren't actually sure about.

Research into social-commerce returns found 28% of Gen Z shoppers had bought through TikTok or Instagram despite being unsure about the item because the video tempted them. Across social marketplaces, around one in five purchases is returned, rising to one in three among Gen Z shoppers.

For brands selling expensive or bulky products, that's not a particularly appealing equation.

So the answer for premium brands shouldn't be to make a £500 purchase feel more impulsive.

It should be to make it feel more informed.

Show the dimensions. Explain the specifications. Compare the options. Talk about delivery. Make the returns policy obvious. Answer questions in the comments. Use LIVE to deal with concerns. Retarget someone who's shown interest with reassurance and education rather than immediately screaming LAST CHANCE at them.

You're not trying to convince absolutely everyone to buy. You're helping the right person feel confident enough to buy. There's a pretty big difference between the two.

That's also why follower count matters even less We've said this before, but TikTok Shop makes it particularly obvious. The creator with the biggest following isn't automatically the person who's going to sell the most laptops.

Someone with 80,000 followers who is completely obsessed with headphones and has an audience that trusts every recommendation they make could be much more commercially useful than someone with two million followers who happens to hold the product up for ten seconds.

For social commerce, we'd want to understand much more than reach.

Does their audience care about the category? What questions do people ask them? Do people save their recommendations? Do they drive searches? Have they demonstrated an ability to convert? Do people actually trust them when they say something is worth buying?

That's the kind of creator intelligence that starts to matter when content gets closer to commerce.

Affiliate data is useful. Just don't become obsessed with the last click.

Best Buy's creator programme will give creators the opportunity to earn commission on eligible sales and give the retailer greater visibility into which products and content are actually converting. We love more useful data. But we'd be careful about suddenly judging every creator by the number sitting in the sales column.

Social shopping isn't always that neat.

One creator might introduce you to the product. Another might explain the difference between two models. You might search for reviews yourself, forget about it for a week, see another TikTok and eventually buy.

The creator who gets attributed the sale isn't necessarily the creator who created the demand.

Affiliate data gives brands another useful signal, particularly when you're testing lots of products and creators.

It's just not the whole story.

Your stock feed is now a social media problem

This is the slightly less sexy bit.

TikTok Shop brings the shop much closer to the content, which means the shop experience becomes part of the social experience too.

If a creator makes a brilliant TikTok, gets thousands of people interested and the product is out of stock, that's a social problem. If the listing has confusing information, that's a social problem. If reviews are terrible, that's a social problem.

If delivery takes forever, that's going to become a social problem the second everyone starts talking about it in the comments.

Stock, pricing, reviews, product information, fulfilment and aftercare aren't sitting neatly on the other side of a website anymore.

They're getting pulled into the social journey.

Which means social teams, ecommerce teams, retail teams, creator teams and paid teams probably need to talk to each other a little more often.

Revolutionary, we know.

Organic finds the signal. Paid turns up the volume.

This is where TikTok Shop gets particularly interesting when you stop thinking about organic, creator and paid as completely different things.

Let's say a creator makes a comparison between three products and one unexpectedly starts flying. The comments are full of questions about it. People are searching for it. Sales start moving.

That's a signal.

Don't just congratulate everyone on a nice organic post and move on.

Take what you've learned. Test different versions. Answer the questions appearing in the comments. Brief more creators. Put paid behind the strongest content. See whether that demand holds with a bigger audience.

Then feed those learnings straight back into the next round of creative. Create. Test. Learn. Scale.

And TikTok Shop makes the distance between each part of it increasingly small.

Please don't turn your TikTok into QVC

There is, of course, an obvious danger here. The easier TikTok makes it to sell things, the more brands are going to try to sell things in every single TikTok. Nobody wants that.

Social commerce doesn't mean every post needs a product tag and every creator needs to spend 45 seconds aggressively pointing at a shopping link.

The content still needs to earn attention.

Make something useful. Compare two products properly. Put the product through a ridiculous test. Answer the question everyone keeps asking. Show how it fits into someone's actual life. Find the creator who knows more about the category than you do and let them explain it.

For premium products in particular, don't try to manufacture urgency where what the customer really needs is reassurance.

Make people want the thing. Give them enough information to trust the thing. Then make buying the thing ridiculously easy.

Social is becoming part of the shop floor

That's why Best Buy bringing nearly 10,000 products to TikTok Shop caught our attention. It's another sign that social is moving much further into the shopping journey.

People aren't only discovering products there. They're researching them, comparing them, reading opinions, asking questions, watching demonstrations and increasingly buying them too. But as the products get more expensive, the challenge changes.

The objective isn't to make a £1,000 purchase feel as impulsive as a £20 one. It's to make buying a £1,000 product through social feel safe enough that somebody is comfortable doing it.

That means creator strategy needs to understand commerce. Ecommerce needs to understand creators. Paid needs to understand what's working organically. Social teams need to know what's actually in stock. And all of them need to understand the audience behind the purchase.

At Pepper, that's why we think about creator marketing, organic social, paid media, production and research as connected parts of the same thing. The more of the customer journey that happens on social, the less sense it makes to plan those things in isolation.

TikTok Shop is making buying easier.

The opportunity for brands is making people want to buy, trust what they're buying and feel confident enough to actually hit checkout.

‍