The annual cross-border e-commerce extravaganza—Black Friday—is approaching! This is not only a global shopping carnival for consumers, but also a golden opportunity for merchants to achieve explosive growth in performance. With its keen insight into market trends, TikTok Shop has taken the lead in launching the first salvo in the 2024 Black Friday preparations. By offering the lowest prices of the year and providing the strongest promotional support, TikTok Shop is focusing on key markets such as the United States, joining forces with self-operated and managed merchants to reach new annual sales highs.

Early Planning: TikTok Shop Prepares for Black Friday

This year, Black Friday topics have already exploded on the TikTok platform, with more than 200,000 videos tagged with Black Friday promotions and total views exceeding 2 billion. Driven by both content and trending topics, consumer enthusiasm and attention for shopping continue to soar. This trend provides merchants with valuable product selection and marketing references, indicating that Black Friday 2024 will bring unprecedented business opportunities. To this end, TikTok Shop has formulated a series of strategic initiatives to help merchants achieve sales breakthroughs during Black Friday.

TikTok Shop will collaborate with local US media and top celebrities and influencers to jointly promote Black Friday, expecting to generate over 5 billion exposures. In addition, the platform will increase content recommendation traffic, launch exclusive gift guides and Black Friday sections, set up limited-time flash sale channels and exclusive low-price tags, and more to enhance user engagement and shopping experience. Through these innovative measures, TikTok Shop aims to bring merchants more traffic and higher conversion rates during Black Friday.

The Charm of Content E-commerce: From Traffic to Sales

TikTok Shop's advantage lies in its powerful content e-commerce ecosystem, which can directly convert traffic into sales. Through influencer marketing, live streaming sales, and self-broadcasting, merchants can precisely reach target consumers and significantly improve sales performance. For example, during the back-to-school season, Pop Mart broke through $280,000 in sales in a single live stream, setting a new record for cross-border brand self-broadcasting.

This content-driven business model offers merchants unlimited possibilities for creating blockbuster products. Previous successful cases show that by collaborating with influencers and leveraging popular topic tags such as #MomsofTikTok, merchants can greatly increase product exposure and sales. For instance, a handheld vacuum cleaner achieved an 18-fold increase in sales during last year's Black Friday through this approach.

Winning Black Friday: Strategy and Execution Go Hand in Hand

To help merchants succeed during Black Friday, TikTok Shop has designed a variety of benefits and preparation strategies for different types of merchants. For self-operated merchants, the platform offers multiple sales opportunities including short videos and live streaming, and incentivizes merchants to actively participate in content creation by rewarding winners of short video and live streaming challenges. The platform also provides traffic subsidies and exclusive discount coupons for live streaming rooms to help merchants expand their influence and boost sales.

Additionally, TikTok Shop has launched the "Zeus Program," "Super Head Brand Program," "Mindset Category Program," and "Blockbuster Product Incubation Program." These initiatives create more sales opportunities for merchants by providing high-quality influencer resources, increasing traffic exposure, and supporting brand incubation. Merchants can leverage these resources and platform support to maximize the commercial potential of Black Friday.

Merchants need to formulate reasonable preparation plans based on their own circumstances. Self-operated merchants should complete stocking and production work from August to October to ensure products are warehoused on time; from October to November, they should focus on creating short videos and live streaming content to attract user attention. Fully managed merchants should complete product testing and new style launches in September, and finalize stocking in October to ensure they can meet large order demands during Black Friday.

Ready to Sprint: Welcoming a Bountiful Black Friday

Black Friday is not just a shopping festival, but also a stage for merchants to showcase their strength and innovation. TikTok Shop has provided cross-border e-commerce merchants with comprehensive support and abundant marketing resources to help them stand out in this global shopping frenzy. Early planning and seizing the opportunities provided by the platform will be key for merchants to achieve sales breakthroughs during Black Friday.

At this upcoming annual e-commerce event, TikTok Shop and its merchants are ready to face new challenges and opportunities. Whether self-operated or managed, as long as merchants flexibly utilize platform resources and keep up with market trends, every merchant has the chance to win their own "highlight moment" during Black Friday.