Still, Amazon cannot afford to lose the chance to sell more in-app things. For this purpose, it has now announced a new integration with TikTok that would allow such users to make an Amazon purchase straight within the TikTok app without the need to navigate through to the Amazon app or website.

For those who are still not on Amazon, using TikTok will be much smoother with this new tie up. Pinterest has also signed a similar deal with the retail giant, though the social networking app has only TikTok it can make any official announcement at present.

TikTok says:

This Amazon-powered shopping experience is available within the TikTok app, where users can find and purchase what they love on Amazon easily. Users can now buy products on TikTok.

So, when users of TikTok see their "For You" feed filling up with recommendations for Amazon products, they can buy at once-how that is enabled is actually the fruit of linking your TikTok profile to your Amazon account, "through a secure, fast and easy one-time set-up."

Note that "secure" is the key term that TikTok wants to focus on here.

With TikTok still under a cloud in the U.S. in the sense of its perceived ties to the Chinese Government, at least some U.S. shoppers will be warry of establishing a direct connection between their Amazon profile and their TikTok presence, at least so as not to expose more of their data to the company.

But convenience is just what TikTok is counting on:

Once your accounts are connected, you can expect Amazon customers to be able to complete a checkout with Amazon in the product ad without ever leaving the TikTok app-enabling a faster, more frictionless experience."
In addition, if you connect your Amazon account, you will see real-time pricing, Prime eligibility, and delivery estimates all within the TikTok listings.

The format in itself is not new, as Amazon signed similar shopping deals with Meta and Snapchat late last year. Addition with TikTok and Pinterest will add more avenues for Amazon to tap into compulsive social shopping behaviors in a streamlined manner; the benefit to the platform will be habitual transformation, through enabling users to buy more things in their apps.

Still, though, social commerce is flailing to gain any real traction on the markets of the West, especially in comparison with China, where shopping through social applications, above all in live streams, has exploded within the last few years.
Not that social shopping has been an abject failure in the West. In fact, adoption of social shopping is accelerating at a pace of around 18% per year, but it's still an extremely long way off of in-person commerce in most regions.

This is largely reflective of shopping trends more broadly, in isolation from social media apps, with adoption of eCommerce steadily rising over time.
the COVID pandemic logically caused a huge increase in e-commerce, which most industry observers assumed would be a harbinger of things to come, with that increase being sustained as shoppers got used to ordering from their phones.

But it's since largely backed off to its pre-COVID trajectory, though slightly higher, now accounting for about 15% of U.S. retail sales.

In that way, the online shopping and social media commerce have been gaining more acceptance in more people over time. And the following generations would probably be even more welcoming of purchase-able product listings within their social feeds; however it is taking longer than many had expected to unfold as this saw many of these projects flail and fade out as users continued separating entertainment and shopping activity.

That, apparently, will shift, but again, Western users are not following the same curves as Chinese ones. Which must be galling for TikTok, given that the Chinese variant of the app now rakes in billions from shopping within the app. 

So you would expect TikTok to maintain in-app commerce as a core opportunity to drive these trends while the other social apps remain current with their complementary offerings in case the pendulum does swing back.