Southeast Asia is in a weird place right now.
Social media is huge, of course. People in our region are notorious chatters, selfie-takers, and video-sharers on WhatsApp, Instagram, and TikTok. Online shopping is growing too. Platforms like Shopee, Lazada, and Tokopedia offer everything from mainstream fashion to collectors’ items.
The question is: where will all of this converge? Right now, Instagram and Facebook may draw the eyeballs, but Meta’s apps haven’t done the best at integrating shopping features right into their social feeds. We explored this in a previous story.
But short-video app TikTok is trying to plug that gap. It’s trying to give its growing Southeast Asian market a taste of what the marriage between social media and commerce could look like. And over the past few months, it's launched a slew of shopping-related features that link TikTok’s main app with e-commerce tools.
It’s doing this for two reasons:
1) it needs to find new monetisation avenues beyond ads.
2) it needs to give creators a reason to stay.
How are Southeast Asian creators and sellers reacting to this offer, and how do they build their monetisation and sales strategies around these new tools?
We delves into that. It’s all about TikTok’s battle to start making money from its vast Southeast Asian user base, while at the same time giving its best creators more options to make money through TikTok, and stay loyal to the app
