These are turbulent times for TikTok employees. On Tuesday, we reported that TikTok is planning significant layoffs—including a large percentage of the roughly 1,000 people working in TikTok’s global user operations, content and marketing teams. The planned cuts are likely to further sap employee morale, already frayed by the possibility of a U.S. ban and past restructurings.
The company is also poised to make a fresh push into Europe, which is emerging as an important market for TikTok because of that ban and as it tries to jumpstart user growth. The company is planning to expand TikTok Shop to France, Germany, Spain and Italy, according to people who have worked on the project or have been briefed about it. It’s unclear when TikTok Shop will be available in those countries, but it’s already invited some merchants to test the service in some new markets, according to The South China Morning Post.
Success isn’t a given. The company faces more ecommerce competition in Europe than in the U.S., where Amazon is its main rival.
“The European market is more diversified because it consists of different countries. The bigger players in the area have their versions of Amazon,” said Marina Kalenchyts, brand director and co-founder of beauty and skincare brand Wonderskin, who is based in London. These include ecommerce companies like Germany’s Zalando and Poland’s Allegro.
Europe is also the region where TikTok saw early fumbles in its first attempt at TikTok Shop, the e-commerce effort that it later launched in fall 2023 in the U.S. And more recently, it halted financial rewards features on a new app TikTok Lite in France and Spain, internally dubbed the Coin App, which ran afoul of European regulators.
TikTok previously told staff that “there is still room to grow” among people 18 and older in the European Union, according to internal launch materials for TikTok Lite. In the EU, the TikTok app is on just 13% of Android devices, compared to 37% for Instagram and 59% for Facebook, the document said.
Still, TikTok has the wind at its back when it comes to e-commerce. It’s poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the effort and offered big discounts for consumers and incentives to merchants to sell on the app. As a result, TikTok signed up more than 500,000 merchants in the U.S. at the end of last year, double than in the previous three months.
European merchants would likely welcome a bigger TikTok effort. Already, Wonderskin’s Kalenchyts said TikTok Shop has been the fastest-growing marketplace for her company. About 20% of Wonderskin’s business comes from TikTok Shop globally. Orders have grown from 50 per week in October to 10,000 per week in March.
But Amazon is still the major driver for Wonderskin, making up about 40% of sales in Europe and 50% of sales in the U.S., according to Kalenchyts.
