The year 2023 has marked a significant recovery for the global e-commerce market, bringing forth fresh opportunities as well as intense competition. Businesses expanding their horizons overseas need to bypass “involution” and focus on innovative, sustainable operation and marketing strategies. This need for innovative strategies has put a spotlight on “Trending Products” – products that, due to their dual value in product effectiveness, are set to shine in the new environment. A comprehensive, fresh perspective guide to trending product strategies can prove to be a valuable reference for brands expanding overseas.
The key benefits of this strategic approach include:
a. Value Recognition
A deep dive into the true value of hot products can help overseas businesses comprehend them better, consequently leveraging their impact to enhance their own operations.
b. Hot Product Insights
Our study of TikTok hot products provides a comprehensive view of their sales performance, commercial content, and native content. This multi-dimensional analysis helps decipher the opportunities and experiences for hot products across various industries.
c. Operation Strategy
We extract operational strategies from successful TikTok hot products, forming a practical guide that can help overseas businesses to better manage their TikTok presence through hot products.
Utilizing TikTok’s trending products can aid businesses in tackling operational challenges, from market competition to user insights. This approach empowers different business operations, reducing costs and boosting efficiency.
TikTok’s social e-commerce, built around a billion-strong user base and immersive native content, provides a conducive environment for trending products throughout their lifecycle, supporting businesses at every step.
Properly understanding and leveraging TikTok’s trending products is vital. They not only drive transactions but also ignite trends like the #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt wave. This opens up opportunities across different markets and industries, providing continual avenues for sales and brand value optimization.
Creating trending products on TikTok requires a strategic selection of products, content optimization, and effective ad placements. Utilizing trending products can expand business reach, enhance brand value, and foster a sustainable operating ecosystem.
Trending Product Opportunities: Social E-commerce Boosting Product Performance
User Behavior Changes
In the current e-commerce landscape, trending product opportunities are flourishing, primarily propelled by social e-commerce platforms. One crucial aspect that’s driving this growth pertains to changes in user behavior.
Today, social e-commerce has become the go-to platform for global consumers, accompanying them throughout their purchase journey, from the discovery phase to decision-making. During the initial discovery phase, consumers lean heavily on the online realm to search for shopping information. They predominantly rely on platforms that provide strong search capabilities, exhibit social attributes, and present authentic word-of-mouth reviews, all of which are cornerstones of social e-commerce.
The subsequent decision-making phase is equally critical. When choosing to shop online, overseas consumers are significantly influenced by marketing-related aspects such as reviews from other consumers and social media accolades. These are areas where social e-commerce shines brightly.
By understanding these evolving consumer behaviors and leveraging social e-commerce’s strengths, businesses can strategically position their products to become the next trending item on these platforms, thereby maximizing their potential for success in the ever-competitive world of e-commerce.
Main online channels global consumers used to seek shopping information in 2022
Image from TikTok Business
Innovative Models
The advent and growth of the social e-commerce model have redefined the consumer experience and the operational value of e-commerce. The chart below traces the transformative journey of the global e-commerce market, showcasing the pivotal shifts and developments that have shaped the industry.
The Evolution of the Global E-commerce Market
Data Source: TikTok Business
Understanding TikTok Social Community E-commerce
In the pulsating heart of the digital universe, the era of social community e-commerce has seized the global market, with TikTok sitting right at the epicenter. This revolutionary approach immerses consumers in a rich tapestry of native content, amplified by the powerful echo of multi-touchpoint word-of-mouth propagation, resonating throughout their shopping journey.
The lifeblood of this model thrives on the interplay of three key elements. Community word-of-mouth forms the heartbeat, providing the trusted voice that consumers listen to. Next, the discovery of quality products – like hidden gems unearthed – ignites shopping inspiration. And finally, entertainment content, crafted into vibrant and engaging video recommendations, paints the consumer journey in compelling hues.
In these buzzing communities, products are not just promoted, they are celebrated. This authentic enthusiasm sparks a word-of-mouth wildfire, spreading the allure of products across the digital landscape.
Leveraging TikTok’s Social E-commerce for Trending Products
In this section, we’ll take a step-by-step approach to unveil how TikTok’s social e-commerce optimizes trending product recommendations to make them more suitable, trustworthy, convenient, and enduring for users. All data shared here are derived from the TikTok Business Report.
Firstly, TikTok’s social e-commerce platform offers a distinct edge in making product recommendations more suitable. The platform’s trending product strategies hinge on community-based interest recommendations, which efficiently break through personalization layers and ensure trending products are fully discovered. The data supports this:
- 71% of users state that TikTok showcases exactly what they are seeking.
- 80% of individuals agree that TikTok allows them to explore diverse topics and interests to find what suits them.
- 82% of users feel secure about the content they share on TikTok, as they know their content reaches an audience with similar interests.
Secondly, TikTok builds trustworthiness in product recommendations. The strategies that underline trending product offerings rely on community-originated content and expert recommendations, fostering swift trust and enabling trending products to be readily accepted by consumers.
- 74% of users believe that TikTok helps them understand a brand or product better.
- 76% of users feel that brands that post or respond to comments on TikTok are part of the community.
- 63% of users find the ad content on TikTok trustworthy.
Thirdly, TikTok’s social e-commerce ensures convenience in its product recommendations. Born out of rich community purchasing paths, TikTok offers a seamless shopping experience, making it easier for consumers to place orders. Customers can open the app, get inspired by short videos or live content, and then directly shop from TikTok Shop.
- 80% of marketers report that consumers are more likely to purchase products directly from social media than from official websites or dealers.
- 49% of e-commerce users on TikTok make immediate purchases when they find a product of interest.
Lastly, TikTok ensures the endurance of its product recommendations. Trending product strategies initiated from the community’s active sharing habits consistently generate related content, keeping word-of-mouth alive and well for trending products.
- One in five TikTok users post tutorials about the products they’ve purchased on TikTok.
- One in four TikTok users mention or post content related to the brand after placing an order.
- One in four TikTok users shows off the great products they’ve bought on TikTok.
TikTok users have a strong desire to share good products, spontaneously forming native topic communities where they continue to share their favorite brands, products, and usage experiences. This behavior generates more organic traffic and business opportunities for trending products. The #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt topic page, for instance, saw its total views skyrocket to 30+ billion in December 2022, and 40+ billion by March 2023. As of May 2023, the cumulative total views for topic pages were: #BeautyTok at 45+ billion, #TechTok at 30+ billion, and #FashionTok at 13+ billion. TikTok’s social e-commerce continues to revolutionize the way users discover, trust, purchase, and share trending products.
How to Properly Understand TikTok’s Trending Products
Trending products on TikTok go beyond just facilitating transactions on TikTok Shop or directing users to external sites for purchases. They also encompass a significant share of products that go viral on TikTok, leading to the #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt buying trend. TikTok’s trending products offer comprehensive coverage across sales, communication, branding, and strategy. While sales and communication can be assessed through data, branding, and strategy require more time and effort for brands to cultivate and validate. A holistic understanding of why trending products on TikTok succeed necessitates insights into TikTok’s user preferences, combined with a comprehensive understanding of macro market demands.
Market Opportunities
Mature markets like North America and Europe offer larger scale while emerging markets such as the Middle East and Latin America present a higher potential for growth and consumer interest.
Data Source: TikTok Business
Examining Sales Performance of Best-selling Products on TikTok Shop
Beauty and personal care products frequently become trending, while the UK market favors fashion apparel.
Data Source: Internal statistics from TikTok Shop’s cross-border e-commerce, covering the UK and Southeast Asia, from May 2022 to April 2023.
FAQ about TikTok Trending Products
-
What is a trending product and why create a trending product?
- Trending products generally refer to goods that are far superior to similar products in terms of popularity and sales volume, covering four major values sales value, dissemination value, brand value, and strategic value.
- Trending products can help businesses expanding overseas deal with many operational pain points such as market competition, user insights, product barriers, and scale of development.
- Trending products can empower various operational links of businesses expanding overseas, reduce operational costs, and improve efficiency.
2. What is TikTok social e-commerce, and what are its characteristics and value?
- TikTok social e-commerce refers to a new type of e-commerce model that centers on TikTok’s billion-monthly-active users worldwide, relying on a vast amount of immersive native content worldwide, multiple touchpoint surround-style word-of-mouth communication, and spanning the user’s shopping journey.
- Whether it’s the tilt of the global e-commerce revenue scale or user favor in the planting grass and decision-making stages, social e-commerce is becoming a more mainstream e-commerce model.
3. Why is TikTok social e-commerce more suitable for creating trending products?
- Social e-commerce can span the entire life cycle of hot products, helping businesses expanding overseas to create hot products at each stage.
- Social e-commerce can span the complete user purchase link, making hot products more suitable, more trustworthy, more convenient, more enduring, and faster.
4. How to correctly understand TikTok trending products?
- In addition to completing transactions in the TikTok Shop or completing transactions outside the station through landing pages and other redirections, TikTok trending products also include a large number of hot products that have ignited word of mouth and broken circle conversions on TikTok, forming the #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt purchase trend.
- The sales and dissemination value of TikTok trending products can be observed in a timely manner through short-term data, while brand and strategic value requires brand owners to spend more time to operate and verify.
- TikTok trending products have different hot product opportunities in different markets and industries.
5. How to create trending products on TikTok?
- Scientific selection of products, combined with TikTok platform insights, good preparation for product selection, and effectively locking in hot products.
- Material optimization, target audience x product selling point decomposition, and conducting A/B Test testing.
- Effective placement, optimizing the infrastructure / phased bidding strategy / maintaining the frequency of product testing to gradually increase ROAS.
- According to the life cycle of each hot product, one by one precipitates the method of playing trending products.
6. How to operate trending products for a longer period on TikTok?
- Use trending products to expand the business territory and achieve effective expansion of products and business expansion.
- Use trending products to create brand value and quickly establish brand influence.
- Use trending products to drive the operating ecosystem and create a hot product operation strategy that can run continuously and stably.