Amazon has had a relationship with TikTok since long before TikTok’s future was at stake, but their recent partnership has taken on latest meaning.
Illustration by Fernando Capeto for Forbes; Images by MirageC/Getty Images; Kenneth Cheung/Getty Images
Amazon is popping to TikTok to tap into social media, and TikTok is popping to Amazon to bolster its burgeoning e-commerce business. Insiders say the collaboration of those “frenemies” could help stave off a ban.
From Alexandra S. LevineForbes Employee
Asthe deadline in January As TikTok faces a sale to an American company or a nationwide ban, the Chinese social media giant is quietly deepening its ties with a serious company that plays a central role in Americans’ day by day lives and is considered one of its biggest rivals: Amazon. It’s a strategic move that may make it harder to shut down TikTok here, industry insiders said. Forbes.
Some consider it is a sign that Amazon is on the table as a possible buyer. “I think the writing is on the wall,” said Roee Zelcer, who until recently was TikTok’s head of sales for services in Israel for greater than three years. (He left the corporate in April to change into U.S. CEO of Humana worldwide creator marketing platform that connects influencers with brands like Google, L’Oréal and Procter & Gamble.)
And even when that acquisition doesn’t undergo, Amazon’s close relationship with and growing reliance on TikTok will likely make the chorus of voices fighting a ban even louder. “Now it’s not just small businesses and influencers who are angry about this ban — it’s Amazon,” Zelcer said. Forbes. “This is a big move on TikTok’s part. It’s a very strategic move to deepen their relationship in the U.S. economy.” TikTok declined to comment. Amazon spokeswoman Maria Boschetti said the corporate doesn’t comment on mergers and acquisitions or speculation.
Oral arguments begin next week within the high-stakes legal battle between the U.S. government and TikTok, which could lead to that country’s first ban on a foreign-owned social media app. In April, President Joe Biden signed a law forcing TikTok’s China-based parent company ByteDance to divest its crown jewel to an American company over national security concerns or face closure early next 12 months. In May, TikTok and ByteDance filed suit against that law, calling it unconstitutional and a thinly veiled try and simply ban the wildly popular platform, while a bunch of TikTok creators filed suit against the U.S. government themselves. Now, with the app’s future uncertain and 4 months left for a sale, the U.S. appeals court in Washington will hear the parties difficult the Justice Department.
Amid this crossfire, TikTok has taken subtle steps to further establish itself within the country where it’s facing expulsion. It has heavily promoted its little-noticed sister app CapCut, which continues to grow within the US. TikTok has abandoned its plans to expand abroad and as a substitute focused on expanding its presence within the US. And just last month, TikTok announced a serious partnership with Amazon that enables people to browse and buy Amazon products on TikTok without ever leaving the app. (Users who see ads for Amazon items of their For You feeds can now link their TikTok and Amazon accounts to simply purchase them in TikTok; previously they’d to navigate to Amazon to achieve this. Once the accounts are synced, they may stay connected unless users proactively disconnect them.) Amazon has also called on his own influencers to do more to advertise Amazon sellers on TikTok.
“Amazon is making it more convenient for customers to shop on social media by expanding in-app shopping to Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and TikTok,” said Amazon’s Boschetti. “In-app shopping with Amazon is available for select products promoted on these popular social media apps and sold by Amazon or by independent sellers in the Amazon store.”
“A possible merger between the two… it’s very simple: two plus two is six.”
The TikTok merger could seem unusual at first glance, on condition that the 2 corporations are amongst one another’s biggest e-commerce competitors. But the collaboration has clear benefits. “Amazon has a background in big e-commerce. How can I leverage social media? TikTok comes from: I’m successful in social media and engagement and I have all these influencers and creators. How can I leverage e-commerce?” asked Zelcer, who recently became TikTok’s head of sales. He described the businesses as “frenemies” with benefits – two giants coming from different directions to attempt to secure social e-commerce land.
Amazon’s attempt at social commerce was Amazon Inspire, a TikTok-style personalized in-app feed of photos and videos for shopping that launched in late 2022, while TikTok’s answer was TikTok Shop, which went live a 12 months later. But the previous failed to achieve nearly as much traction – and Amazon Live couldn’t sustain with TikTok Live on social shopping – while the latter was affected by concerns concerning the quality of its too-cheap products. They saw a possibility in one another.
“For TikTok, I now access all of the e-commerce shoppers that Amazon has, so I get all that credibility, that trust, the Amazon brand, which TikTok still faces plenty of problems with [with]. … For Amazon, it is a option to capitalize on virality and the incontrovertible fact that they haven’t got plenty of Gen Z shoppers on their platform — an audience they’d wish to goal,” Zelcer said. (This would also give TikTok a major lead over Shein and Temu, its Chinese fast-fashion competitors which are exploding within the U.S.)
According to a market research firm, Amazon has change into TikTok’s third-largest advertiser within the US, with only Google and Walmart being larger Sensor tower (TikTok promoting accounts for five percent of Amazon’s spending). Internal TikTok materials received from Forbes show that Amazon had greater than half a dozen promoting accounts on TikTok in 2023, including for Amazon Fashion, Amazon Style, Amazon Books, Amazon Health and Amazon’s Black Business Accelerator. There were also promoting accounts for Amazon’s public policy and PR team, in addition to the marketing team, which focused on Amazon’s latest AI-powered shopping assistant Rufus, amongst other things. Boschetti, the Amazon spokesperson, said Amazon advertises on TikTok like every other company or retailer.
“Now it’s not just small businesses and influencers who are angry about this ban – Amazon is too.”
The two corporations’ deepening relationship is being managed partially by a team TikTok calls “Team Amazon,” in line with TikTok’s own job postings and LinkedIn worker pages, which incorporates positions in New York, California and Washington state. Many of those employees sit in TikTok’s sprawling “Global Agencies and Accounts” group, which is led by chief executive Khartoon Weiss and adjoining to TikTok’s president of world business solutions, Blake Chandlee, who oversees the corporate’s promoting arm and reports to CEO Shou Chew. A big portion of the TikTok employees constructing the Amazon business notably got here from Amazon itself, LinkedIn shows, including TikTok’s global head of Amazon, TikTok Shops head of product marketing and others who previously worked on Amazon’s influencer program.
The approach appears to be: “If you can’t beat them, join them,” said Julian Reis, CEO of SuperOrdinarythat connects hundreds of creators and types to assist them scale across TikTok, Amazon and other platforms and grow through social commerce. He called the TikTok-Amazon integration “a very, very smart move” on each side. But he said that while the worth to TikTok – by way of the revenue it should generate and the wealth of customer data it should possess – can’t be overstated, the collaboration could cause problems for Amazon in the long term.
“Amazon could lose a few of its control now, [is that] It could change into a drug and a co-dependency because that is how you discover all of your latest customers,” Reis said. “Why would you ever turn off the faucet?”
Have a tip about TikTok, ByteDance or social media? Contact Alexandra S. Levine securely via Signal/WhatsApp at (310) 526–1242 or via email at alevine@forbes.com.
This may be a giant incentive for Amazon to purchase TikTok.
If ByteDance agrees to spin off TikTok’s U.S. business, the recently announced partnership between Amazon and the corporate may very well be step one toward a possible acquisition, Zelcer said. “When you look at Amazon taking over that social platform – swallowing that whole Gen-Z audience and that engagement and integrating all of their e-commerce and logistics and everything that flows into Amazon through TikTok – and making that a social e-commerce platform, that’s huge,” he said.
“And that could be a possible merger between the two. … It’s very simple: two plus two is six.”
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