Despite all of this, TikTok has not given up on making in-stream shopping a reality. It hopes to have the same success as it does in the Chinese market with the Western masses.

Its latest attempt at this includes a new visual discovery product option. Users would take a photo of an item and then find similar matches for it in Shop listings.
such as a new TikTok image search option, in testing with selected markets outside the US would work like image search on Google or like Pinterest's Lens tool, which scans an image of a product to use for the basis of a search.

Which might unlock more discovery potential, and make TikTok more of a shopping search tool - though, the fact that it's being tested in markets outside the US is relevant, because as noted, while Western users haven't warmed to in-stream shopping in the app ad yet, many Asian users have, with South East Asian TikTok users rapidly adopting live-stream shopping, similar to their Chinese counterparts.

Which is a weird regional anomaly. Now, in China, live-stream commerce is huge on its local version of TikTok, called Douyin, and that's by far the app's biggest money-spinner. The app is also now enjoying sustained in-app shopping growth in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines-that corresponds to the more adaptive approach of Asian markets to online shopping, and the diversification of social apps in usage.

That presents considerable opportunities for TikTok, but it really does want to break into the US and EU markets as an avenue of unlocking higher revenue share potential, and growing its usage in these regions, too.

But as almost all social apps have recently discovered, western customers are not as willing to embrace the concept of live-stream and in-stream purchase options, mainly because of safety and quality issues as well as the very basic replacement of the IRL experiences that western consumers seem to be more attached to than other regions.

Indeed, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the subsequent lockdowns around the world, US online shopping went stratospheric in just a few months, accelerating the shift away from physical stores five years within months. This view was that this would worsen the decline of physical shopping – however, within weeks of the lifting of lockdowns visits to physical stores returned to basically the same or similar levels of what was seen before the pandemic.
Western audiences seem more tied to their habitual behaviors in this respect, and while online shopping is rising steadily, it hasn’t become the transformative trend that it has in Asian markets, at least not at this stage.

Still, TikTok is hopeful that it catches on, and it's still pushing to shift user behaviors in that respect. And as younger audiences move into higher spending brackets, that's just going to happen in any event-but the question is whether TikTok can be the key source of purchases for this audience, or whether other apps will steal its thunder in this respect.

Its cultural presence should stand it in good stead, and data also suggests that more and more young people are using TikTok and IG as search engines over Google, another key behavioral shift in this respect.

Maybe the proliferation of generative AI will change that again, but TikTok's still holding out hope that it can make TikTok shopping a thing, and this new search option will be yet another tool in its growing arsenal to power its eCommerce growth.