One, two, TikTok’s coming for you. Three, four, better lock your stores. In August, TikTok began rolling out its TikTok Shop feature to 150M monthly active users in the US — and now they can find a feed of “recommended” products beside their “For You” tab.

TikTok is going after the dominant US e-commerce giant Amazon and other Chinese e-commerce companies like Shein and Temu (NASDAQ:PDD) — which have flooded the US market with cheap goods. And the fight is intensifying right before one of the most important shopping periods of the year:

• Between Oct. 27 and Nov. 30, TikTok is subsidizing up to 50% of discounts.
• TikTok is targeting $20B in merchandise sales this year — 4x that of last year.

But shopping inside social media apps has failed to take off in the US. Just ask Meta (NASDAQ:META), which killed its live shopping feature this year. And even if TikTok can make it work, it still faces a range of issues ahead.

Dupes: “TikTok made me buy it”

Inside the shopping feed, products from brands like Revolve and Nike are blended with highly discounted China-manufactured goods or products with misspelled names — drawing criticism over copyright issues, counterfeits and potentially dangerous beauty products.

Even before Shop’s launch, videos highlighting cheaper knock-off products had become increasingly popular — with the hashtag #dupe breaking 5.5B+ views on the platform.

• TikTok said, “There are over 200K verified US merchants on TikTok Shop selling legitimate products” (BBG).
• Bloomberg found several Chinese brands on TikTok that Amazon had already banned for fake reviews.

Forward-looking: Last year, 5% of Indonesia’s e-commerce transactions happened on TikTok — which has become such a threat to offline sellers that Indonesia is planning to ban transactions on social media. In recent years, US lawmakers have already threatened to ban TikTok over security concerns — and these issues, alongside worries over collecting user payment data, could lead to renewed efforts to rein in the app.