You'll Soon Be Able to Shop for Amazon Products Directly Through TikTok and Pinterest

Amazon is expanding its reach by partnering with TikTok and Pinterest, allowing users to purchase products directly from these apps without visiting Amazon's website.

It's not a new occurrence that social media use their popularity to encourage users to buy products, and some have even become fully fledged e-commerce platforms in their own right. 

On August 8th, The Information and Bloomberg reported that Amazon had formed new partnerships with TikTok and Pinterest. These agreements will allow users to purchase Amazon products directly within the TikTok and Pinterest apps without being redirected to Amazon's website. Currently, this feature is available only in the U.S.

TikTok provided more details about this development in a blog post. Users will see Amazon product recommendations appear as ads integrated into their "For You" feed, carefully selected by the algorithm based on their interests. They can then make purchases directly from the social network, provided they link their account with the e-commerce platform.

Payments can be completed within the TikTok app itself. ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, mentioned that "users who choose to link their accounts in the U.S. will see real-time prices, Prime eligibility, delivery estimates, and product details on select Amazon product ads on TikTok as part of the experience." However, it's not yet known if this new feature will be expanded outside the United States.

These agreements allow Amazon to diversify its sales channels and tap into the billions of users on these platforms, capitalizing on the growing trend of social shopping, also known as community shopping. It's not the first time the e-commerce giant has established such partnerships, having done so previously with Meta and Snapchat.

However, this move is more surprising from TikTok's perspective. The social network has been ramping up its efforts to develop its own online shopping platform for some time. It has launched TikTok Shop in the U.K. and U.S., allowing brands to sell their products directly within the social network. TikTok also tested the Trendy Beats feature to sell its own products. But selling products through Amazon might slow down this model.