Are influencers sold on TikTok Shop?
Are influencers sold on TikTok Shop?
The viral sales sensation is raising ethical concerns in the content creation community.
Scrolling through my TikTok feed last spring, a story post by Emma Topp grabbed my attention.
The digital content creator told her audience of more than 100,000 followers that if she were to ever work with TikTok Shop, they should “check on her” because she would have been “forced into it.”
As a regular viewer of Topp’s content, I laughed and kept scrolling. But after seeing her post, I took notice of the obvious influx of TikTok Shop ads – each one tagged with the orange shopping cart icon above the video’s description.
If you’re one of the 102.3 million users on TikTok in the U.S., you are likely familiar with the app’s popular “TikTok Shop” feature, which seamlessly blends a user’s For You and Following pages.
The feature, which just had its one-year anniversary in September, allows TikTok users to become consumers. This creates an opportunity to purchase anything and everything in the app, from ice machines to vanilla body oil to popular book series. The catch? Influencers can promote these products by blending them into their usual content, providing direct links that connect to a page in the app where you can buy the item they’re sponsored to promote.
TikTok Shop’s growth
Nearly a year after its release, TikTok Shop has become a marketing and sales powerhouse rivaling other websites that offer a broad variety of products like Amazon. This builds on the app’s original design by allowing content creators to work directly with brands, where they receive payments for their brand and product sponsorships and push TikTok Shop-related content on the For You page so it receives more views.
As TikTok Shop has grown in popularity, creators have begun to question whether to work with the feature to grow their brand or to work with other companies that may not be able to provide the same financial benefits and engagement.
This struggle emerged amidst Congress voting to approve the national TikTok ban proposed by President Trump in 2020, which was signed by President Biden in April of this year. The ban itself would be detrimental to all creators who rely on TikTok for income, regardless of their ethical choices when it comes to brand deals.
“I think objectively the concept of TikTok Shop is really neat,” Topp said. “Obviously it makes a lot of sense to further monetize a relatively new app. And like, coming from a marketing standpoint…to drive traffic directly to an in-platform sales feature is like incentivizing to both creators, brands, and the app itself.”
However, Topp stood by the original statement she made on her TikTok story, saying, “It turns into people just pushing random product, so much product, with the pure motivation of money in mind.”
Conversely, Alaina Titley, a student at Ohio University with 25.9K followers on TikTok, feels that working with TikTok Shop has been one of the best decisions she made for her social media career.
“Most of the income that I’ve gotten – and I would say probably smaller creators like me, like micro-influencers, if they do TikTok Shop, they’re probably seeing those numbers more in that department,” Titley said.
Both Topp and Titley noticed that items on their accounts and other creators’ videos promoting TikTok Shop receive significantly more likes and views than similar videos working with brands outside the app.
Topp explained that it’s a standard marketing strategy to push TikTok Shop-related content to more viewers, likely leading to more sales and allowing TikTok to see the biggest profit margins than competitors. This means that when a creator promotes an item through TikTok Shop, the algorithm will likely give their account more views, which pushes sales and helps them earn a larger commission.
The implications of banning TikTok
However, despite content creators raising conversations regarding TikTok Shop’s ethicality and monetary benefits, they continue to be overshadowed by the U.S. government’s decision to pursue a nationwide TikTok ban.
The idea of a TikTok ban itself is not new, as India banned the popular app in June 2020 after an altercation on the India-China border that resulted in the deaths of 20 Indian soldiers. TikTok was banned alongside several other Chinese-based apps, turning the ban into a symbol of Indian nationalism.
However, some Indian citizens feel that the TikTok ban was not only a response to diplomatic issues between India and China but also a result of India’s extreme class system.
Soham Sinha, a PhD student at Syracuse University, was still living in India in 2020 when TikTok was banned.
“When I think of the national ban in India about TikTok, there’s also a very classist element to that as well…When it became popular, it was mainly people from a certain class who were widely using TikTok,” Sinha explained. “It happened to be [people] from the poorer class in India, the quote-unquote less sophisticated class.”
We are now seeing a similar trajectory with the United States’ TikTok ban.
Sinha remarked that while the core of the U.S. ban is focused on national cyber security, it’s undeniable that TikTok has given the “common man” a platform for self-expression and financial gain that other forms of social media have been unsuccessful at imitating to this degree.
Can other platforms compare to TikTok?
Lola Lapier, a TikTok creator with 16.6K followers, expressed her concerns with creators’ ability to shift to other platforms because of how unique TikTok’s algorithm is.
“I feel like if Facebook and Instagram could have done what TikTok is doing they would have already, and yet it just hasn’t translated at all,” Lapier explained.
Whilst short-form video content is easy to replicate, as seen through Instagram’s addition of reels and YouTube’s shorts, the algorithm that allows creators to reach millions of viewers at once is TikTok’s secret recipe. Anyone can create a viral video at the click of a button, making success as a content creator a game of chance that normal people win every day.
Sinha also expressed an opinion that the U.S. TikTok ban could be centered on how the app processes user information, but could also be garnering so much support from the government because of the app’s unique ability to let everyday people gain fame and wealth.
“Platforms like TikTok, or even YouTube, Instagram, are sort of resting power from these institutions to an extent, and putting that power into the hands of the individuals,” he said. “Which I can see why that would be a source of anxiety for the capitalist economy itself.”
Despite the U.S. government’s actions towards a national ban, TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, claimed in a video posted to the app on April 24 that TikTok will dispute the ban in court. On May 7, 2024, TikTok and its parent company ByteDance legally filed to challenge the U.S. government over the law, likely turning TikTok’s fate into a years-long battle that is just getting started.
This clash between TikTok and the government allows time for more features like TikTok Shop to develop in the app, complicating the app’s relationship with the public even further.
Moving forward morally
As TikTok continues to operate in the U.S., combined with TikTok Shop’s growing popularity, creators are finding ways to work with TikTok Shop that fit their moral standards.
Titley expressed that while working with TikTok Shop has been necessary to make money from her content and build a following, she is still wary of the products she is willing to promote.
“Is this something that I would want my followers to buy because of me?” she considers. “I will only post if the quality meets the expectations.”
Topp, although unyielding in her decision not to post TikTok Shop products, does see the perspective of the creators who work with them.
“I just feel like there’s a line in the sand to draw… I have a friend who works with TikTok Shop and she only talks about small businesses or products she enjoys,” Topp said, echoing Titley’s opinion.
When I contemplated making my first TikTok shop purchase, I thought back to Emma Topp’s original story post. As a consumer, I had held off buying items from the feature because the influencer promotions I had seen felt just like Topp described them, as poorly made advertisements trying to convince me to buy a million things I did not need. But when I saw a video on my For You Page promoting a small business’s Taylor Swift-inspired crewneck that had been independently designed and created, I found that my reservations about ordering from TikTok shop disappeared. I was sold.
While TikTok Shop may have a complex structure that puts pressure on creators and consumers alike to set their ethical boundaries within promotion and shopping, it can also give a platform to the small creators and brands who rely on it for financial success – adding to the benefits and drawbacks of the feature for content creators, consumers, and businesses alike.