With TikTok looking for new ways to monetize its revenue potential - most notably around in-stream shopping - the company has filed a couple of new trademark requests in the U.S. - which could be telling for wider offerings to come at the app.

TikTok recently filed two new U.S. trademarks, reports Semafor.

"One appears to be an app, TikTok Go, designed to support "restaurants, retail businesses, the travel industry, and other online and offline businesses." It promises to help build marketing and advertising materials, create financial projections meant to review marketing investments, provide marketing advisory and technical consulting, among others."

The trademark filing does very specifically identify this as a separate app, though I suspect that it may also be related to the mini-app offerings that have become a key element of the Chinese version of TikTok.

On Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, third-party developers can include "Mini Programs", basically just smaller, lighter apps of theirs that they host inside the larger Douyin ecosystem.
Douyin's mini programs are located on the left side of the app's function menu and will give access to a variety of food orders, ride-hailing, ticket sales, etc., all provided through Douyin itself, allowing Douyin's user to do much more with their day-to-day transactions in a single place, opening up even more space for Douyin to extend user behavior.

Perhaps the same is going for TikTok, and this new TikTok Go program may give them a playground through which third-party partners may be able to build their mini-apps on some other platform that gets displayed in TikTok itself.

The bigger idea, then, would be to get people doing more things within the app, which could then help it expand its broader in-stream shopping ambitions. That's where the real money is. For comparison, Douyin generated over $500 billion from in-app sales in 2023, dwarfing TikTok's intake.

What the road map to Douyin's success is for what TikTok is looking, and I so expect that this will be another way in which they're doing to make in-stream shopping and purchase activity.

Other trademark filing from TikTok relates to its buy-now-pay-later service, namely TikTok PayLater.

"TikTok references a PayLater service on its Philippine website, enabling customers using the app's e-commerce platform TikTok Shop to split their payments into monthly installments.".

Says Semafor: Filing the trademark suggests that the US version of the same will be able to play more roles, though conceptually, it is still a payment program, purported to make in-stream transactions possible in entirely new ways.

It remains to be seen if TikTok will make in-app shopping a thing, because while expanded shopping, and live-stream shopping, particular resonated in Asian markets, Western consumers are still cold to these options.

That is evolving and the trends do indicate younger audiences are more receptive to in-app purchases, but Western shoppers don't quite romance buying through social apps or payment capabilities/ordering functionality all being integrated into one app, preferring to have separate functions in separate apps instead.

This could change, but this might also take time. Either way, expect the platform of TikTok to keep on pushing with this effort in hopes of boosting its revenue intake.