TikTok’s Trend of Humans Pretending to be Robots Inspires Optimism for US Shopping

In front of a green-screened image depicting a bedroom illuminated by pink fluorescent lights, a woman wearing an ash-blond wavy wig energetically bounces with a robotic demeanor. She appears slightly breathless but maintains a smile as she captivates thousands of viewers on TikTok through their mobile phones. Suddenly, a small cartoon hot dog pops up on the screen, catching everyone’s attention.

“Thanks for the glossy. Bing bong,” Crystal Alana Bennett says to a fan who had just spent 7 cents to send her a virtual bauble known as a “glizzy” in Internet parlance, prompting her to sing about the gift. She goes back to bobbing up and down before yelling, “It there’s corn!” over and over again – enough times to match the corn on the cob sent in quick succession by another fan.

Bennett behaves like a non-playable character, or NPC, the name given to characters you encounter in video games who only have a few predetermined lines of dialogue. That day, about 15,000 people tuned in to watch her stream on ByteDance Ltd.’s popular video app TikTok — almost enough to pack the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. In video games, the limited functions of NPCs can make them boring. But when someone like Bennett plays that role live, people on TikTok are shocked and quick to open their pocketbooks.

While these streams are curious and weird, they’re also the biggest live video trend to hit TikTok in the US. Glizzies and corn don’t seem like serious business, but every creator like Bennett brings TikTok a little closer to realizing what could be a huge opportunity to replicate its multibillion-dollar Asian livestream business in the coveted U.S. market. TikTok’s biggest competitors haven’t been able to make live streaming videos widely popular in America, but this latest trend is persuading more and more users of the app to “go live.”

TikTok has emerged as a juggernaut in social commerce and expects to sell $20 billion in products through its media platform this year — four times more than in 2021, Bloomberg has reported. The majority of sales come from its Southeast Asian markets, where the core of TikTok’s Shop retail strategy is the use of creators in live video.

Bennett can earn about $700 an hour from viewer gifts since he began entering NPC form daily since mid-July, he said in an interview. “It’s kind of like an SNL or In Living Color skit,” he said. “I’m always laughing, and I’m always following gifts, and I think people enjoy my life.”

Expanding the TikTok Shop into the app’s global market is a priority “at one of the highest levels in the company right now,” said a person familiar with the strategy, who asked not to be identified to discuss internal priorities. But cracking the U.S. streaming retail market means succeeding where its biggest competitors have failed. Meta Platforms Inc.’s Instagram killed the ability for users to tag products in live broadcasts in March. Google’s YouTube and Amazon.com Inc. have offered similar experiences but haven’t scaled.

“TikTok is really trying to make live video happen, understanding that changing consumer behavior is incredibly challenging and that live streaming commerce is not yet mainstream in the US,” said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence.

TikTok chose the UK as an early testing ground for livestream commerce in Western markets, and the results were predictable. The events were plagued by low sales and low attendance, the Financial Times reported last year. The company did not respond to requests for comment.

With its eyes on the U.S., management decided that instead of focusing on the streaming business first, it would split its strategy, people familiar with the matter said. TikTok would create a commercial operation that could compete with Amazon, while encouraging users to spend more time live.

Internally, TikTok calls its purchasing activity “community commerce,” one of the people said. It’s set to build on the success of its trademark video feed, which is intensely tailored to the individual interests of over a billion users. Personalization has helped create a wide range of groups in the app that people feel they belong to – and whose specific characteristics make them easy to target with products.

These communities, sometimes known by names with “-Tok” attached, often have their own inside jokes and recurring contributors. There’s BookTok for avid readers, who have also been known to comment on the accounts of massively attractive hockey players as if they were the protagonist of a romance novel. Or TikTok’s Private Chefs, which is surrounded by a group of chefs who work for elite clients every summer in the Hamptons.

When TikTok launched Shop US in a limited capacity in November and expanded earlier this year, the goal was to seamlessly weave the shopping experience into these groups without appearing as overt as an ad. A BookToker can see another user display their favorite reading light, while a diner can see the chef’s frying pan. Now those videos — including the pre-recorded videos that make up the majority of a user’s feed — have product tags and people can make purchases.

The company’s goal is to build a complete marketplace so users can eventually add products from multiple merchants to their carts and make a payment at the same time, said the executive, who asked not to be identified to discuss internal strategy. TikTok also handles payment processing for merchants and handles communication with buyers after purchase, one of the people said. This means that the entire shopping experience would be within the app.

These commerce features are familiar to Americans who routinely search for and purchase products on their smartphones. At the same time, TikTok has been trying to drum up interest in that unfamiliar exercise — watching live streams. In February, the app launched a program called “Go LIVE, Make Money” that encourages popular creators to stream and encourages viewers to send them virtual gifts. Stream for more than an hour, convince other users to join you on the screen and collect enough gifts, and you will receive a performance bonus from the company. In September, TikTok will present a live music competition where the winner will earn a digital prize that can also be withdrawn in cash.

The NPC trend is notable for not being set by TikTok. It became a hit because people were genuinely interested in it. That organic popularity is “incredibly important because if you think about TikTok shopping and TikTok trading, it happened organically,” Insider Intelligence’s Enberg said.

TikTok has already established itself as a place where culture is happening, and it includes cool when it comes to makeup, fashion and other consumer trends. Products featured in viral videos often sell out. Videos with the hashtag #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt (short for “I saw something on TikTok, so I bought it”) have been viewed more than 56 billion times. Most of these views are pre-TikTok Shop, so users can buy products elsewhere and on TikTok without a cut.

“If they can reproduce some of it in this new format in live video, that could really help get a lot more exposure and usage,” Enberg said.

Still, combining shopping and streaming video in the US isn’t easy. TikTok is grappling with years of U.S. government scrutiny over its ownership of the Chinese tech company, and there are several bills in Congress that could ban the app. TikTok’s US commerce business announced the leadership earlier this week. CEO Sandie Hawkins is leaving, Information reported, and the company hired Nicolas Le Bourgeois, longtime Amazon’s chief merchandising officer, and Marni Levine, formerly chief merchandising officer at Meta and EBay Inc.

And when it comes to streaming video, one trend is not enough to help TikTok succeed. It still needs to convince a bunch of popular live content creators that they should be selling products in addition to capturing their audience.

Take Jon Moss, one of those creators who has made a lot of money being an NPC live. In one recent 21-hour stream, he raised $10,000 in donations, he said in an interview. That day, he behaved like a unique brand of angry NPC, pulling the audience with insults – and the fans loved it.

A comedian at heart, Moss is the ideal creator to help TikTok make live videos popular, but he’s still not convinced he should move into commerce. “I personally am not that type of person – I don’t want to sell things to people,” he said.