TikTok concluded its first livestreamed e-commerce sales session featuring U.S. retail giant Walmart on Friday night, with up to 20,000 viewers watching the one- hour show.
The TikTok-Walmart partnership comes after the Beijing-based owner ByteDance agreed in September to sell a stake in TikTok to Walmart Inc. and Oracle Corp.
The Walmart tie-up represents one of the global video company’s first experiments with e-commerce livestreaming outside China. TikTok’s Chinese equivalent Douyin ranks second behind Alibaba’s livestream site Taobao Live in the domestic market.
The competition over live-streaming e-commerce in the U.S. looks set to become heated as Amazon and Facebook have also rolled out e-commerce features, trying to capitalize on consumers cooped up at home during the pandemic.
– This article originally appeared on Caixin Global. Read the full story here.
