With TikTok’s immeasurable success and impact on current trends, it makes perfect sense that they’ve begun one of their most serious forays into in-app shopping. TikTok is working with brands including streetwear label Hype to test in-app sales in Europe. This is a move that puts it in direct competition with Zuck’s app, further muddling the divide between social media and eCommerce.

Bloomberg points out that TikTok has made some shopping moves in the past, like giving creators the ability to sell merchandise through an integration with Teespring and partnering with Shopify. However, this new prototype sounds closer to how shopping’s been integrated on Instagram. This project features a separate shopping tab under a brand’s account that lists products with images and prices, instead of just natively plopping some shoppable content on your timeline. 

Parent company ByteDance is diving head first into a $1.7 trillion Chinese e-commerce arena in hopes of adding another mega-growth story to its repertoire upon a highly anticipated IPO. It aims to handle over $185 billion of e-commerce annually by 2022, building on the legs of social media giants TikTok and Douyin.

But why now? eMarketer predicts that the online retail segment will generate around $5 trillion (with a T) this year. They are joining other social media giants around the world who are scrambling to grab their juicy portion of those sales. 

Amazon is reaching out to third-party sellers the old school way; good ‘ol snail mail. After requiring third-party sellers to make their business names and addresses public this past September, Amazon is now making sure their addresses are authentic and accurate. The Seattle-based company is sending postcards to third-party businesses to verify their name and address, a method that dates back to the 1860s.

Amazon confirmed to CNBC that it began testing the initiative with new sellers last year, then they branched it out to existing sellers in the beginning of 2021. Three third-party sellers also told CNBC that Amazon informed them this week that they would soon receive the postcards in question.

It’s a fairly simple process. First, Amazon directs a seller to an internal portal called Seller Central where Amazon verifies the address of the seller’s business. Then Amazon sends postcards containing verification codes to those addresses.

Sellers then have a 60 day window to use the mailed codes to verify their information.

The postcard system is part of a larger goal by Amazon to verify information about its sellers since local laws have already forced the company to provide these details to shoppers in Europe, Japan and Mexico. Not to mention it’s no secret that the eCom giant has been in hot water lately regarding privacy and authenticity.

It seems like one moment, we all lived peacefully having absolutely no idea about the world of NFTs. In the blink of an eye it seems to be the hot topic of conversation in the news. Now, eCommerce giants have started eyeing the possibility of allowing NFTs to be used as currency, and eBay is the first to officially test the waters. 

eBay is allowing non-fungible tokens for digital collectibles like trading cards, images or video clips to be used as currency on its platform. 

Right now, eBay wants to make sure that NFTs are listed by trusted sellers, and only in certain categories like trading cards, music, entertainment, and art. The company hopes to eventually expand its policies and tools in the future to allow more categories after it’s gathered feedback from the community regarding the current stipulations. 

eBay’s CEO also noted that the company would be open to accepting cryptocurrencies in the future, but at the moment the NFTs being sold on the platform seem to be using its standard payment system linked to a credit card or PayPal account. So in due time, whether you’ve got some Dogecoin collecting dust in your Robinhood account, or you’re the peanut butter baby who just sold his likeness as an NFT, you can use it to your advantage on eBay. 

On this episode of In The Ring we have Adam Rose. He has recruited in-house for companies such as Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, AIG, and Pfizer. As the sole Recruiting Manager for Borderfree, a leading global eCommerce and international shipping startup, Adam scaled the business from 40 to 300 employees prior to the company’s successful acquisition by Pitney Bowes. 

Adam is an expert at recruiting candidates for eCommerce strategy and management, online marketing, marketplaces, trade marketing, shopper marketing, merchandising, operations, and web analytics.

Listen on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.