Zainab Hakim finds it tiring to go to the shops but thinks she might be addicted to shopping. She’s a 23-year-old receptionist from Birmingham, and doesn’t visit the high street to buy clothes – she watches sellers livestream on the social media site TikTok, peddling their wares in real time. With a couple of clicks, she can buy things via the app. “I probably have an addiction at this point,” she says. “I just get sucked in.”
At any time of day, you can scroll through TikTok Live and see someone selling all sorts of things – from clothes to fitness equipment to toys to sweets, cakes, crystals and coffee mugs. One afternoon in 2022, Hakim bought eight items from eight sellers. “It’s things you don’t even need,” she says. Recently, she bought a kitchen gadget that spiralises potatoes, simply because “it looked cool”. She especially likes buying clothes because, “You can ask them to show you the material and they’ll bring it up close to the camera so you get an idea of what you’re buying.”
This is not a new phenomenon – live shopping has been big in China since 2016 and the shopping channel QVC has been doing something similar on TV for 37 years – but fans say it’s the future of retail. Even celebrities are doing it: the model Katie Price sells clothes to her 1.4m TikTok followers, munching fish fingers before trying on trousers and showing off matching tops. Beyond TikTok, Amazon and Facebook have their own live shopping features, while Marks & Spencer runs shoppable streams on its website.
According to a survey by the Influencer Marketing Factory ad agency, a quarter of Britons have ordered during a livestream event. The majority bought clothes or beauty items but more than 13% bought electronics and almost 12% ordered furniture and home decor.
“Because everything is entertainment nowadays, users want to see a product in real time from a content creator,” says Alessandro Bogliari, the founder and CEO of the Influencer Marketing Factory. His survey found that most Britons who have ordered from a livestream are aged between 19 and 35. As Hakim says: “Ninety per cent of my friends have bought at least one thing off TikTok.” These young shoppers are spending enough to change the fortunes of sellers.
“It’s phenomenal,” says Lee Tregear, 54, who owns sweets and souvenir shops in Stevenage. At the start of the year, one of Tregear’s employees started a TikTok account for the business and Tregear managed to attract 105,000 viewers while he advertised – of all things – a pickle. Sales of the vegetable briefly became a TikTok trend. “From then, we started doing TikToks every single day,” Tregear says. “It’s actually made the [bricks and mortar] shop popular. People have travelled to see us; I sit there taking selfies and doing autographs.”
For at least two hours a day – sometimes as many as six – Tregear goes live on his @thecandyzone.co.uk TikTok account. In an upstairs storeroom that he has converted into a small set, Tregear shows off new sweets, does giveaways and packs up orders. “It’s hard because you have to keep talking,” he says. Still, it’s worth it. The day before we spoke, Treagar went live for four hours, attracted 5,000 viewers and secured 140 orders.
“It’s just a different world. People like seeing their products being packed, they like hearing their names. I think it’s about being part of a thing,” Tregear says, adding that regular customers talk to each other in the comment section. “We’ve got a lady from America that watches us every day now.”
Watching a woman and her infant daughter livestream about makeup brushes one morning, I’m amazed to see commenters update one another about their new jobs and shift patterns. This seems the kind of conversation people would usually have with a friend or relative, but then I realise these viewers are friends – they greet each other by name and even encourage each other to make purchases.
You can’t scroll TikTok Live for long before coming across Nikia and Mike Marshall, a couple who sell clothes and cosmetics on their TikTok account @mikeandnikia, which has more than 200,000 followers. Nikia models outfits to show customers how they fit while commenters make requests such as: “Please can you show me the bottom of the jumpsuit” and, “Will it be too long on me? I’m 5ft 2in.”
“I go live pretty much all day,” says Nikia, 23, who has been selling on TikTok for two years and buys stock from “all over Europe”. The Marshalls don’t want to say how much they make from their videos – “I don’t want it to come across big-headed,” says Nikia – but both say that selling on the app has changed their lives. “Let’s put it this way – it’s given us a career,” says Mike, 38.
Nikia says her customers “really like building a relationship with you that is real”, adding that she considers some of them to be friends. Fortunately, “if you’re selling on a livestream where the audience feel connected to you, they obviously feel more compelled to buy”. The couple don’t read from a script, and Nikia thinks that being natural is why it works so well.
Yet there is a major downside to live-selling like this: negative comments. “You always get trolls,” Tregear says of his candy livestreams. His sister-in-law sits at home and moderates the comments alongside other volunteers. Nikia, meanwhile, says: “I get a lot of hate. It would be easier to sell through a website because you don’t deal with that as much.”
On TikTok, clothing sellers in particular are often criticised for dealing in environmentally unfriendly fast fashion. “We are not a massive company, we’re not a great big corporation,” says Mike. While customers might connect with companies because they can see sellers’ faces, it also means criticism is targeted directly at individual sellers. If a seller owns the business, that is one thing but if an employee is streaming on behalf of a small business owner, it might be harder to deal with nasty comments.
There are profits to be made in live shopping and big brands such as M&S, Charlotte Tilbury, Coach and L’Oréal have taken the plunge, too, with the help of LiSA, a live shopping agency based in Düsseldorf. Marks & Spencer launched M&S Live through m&s.com in October 2021. About 90% of livestreams are hosted by existing company staff, including designers and product buyers.
Naturally, Lumsden, Tregear and the Marshalls believe that live shopping is the future, not a fad. Adrian Palmer, head of marketing at Henley Business School, is more reserved. “If you want to buy a very cheap T-shirt, it’s still much more cost effective to go into Primark on a Saturday afternoon and queue up.” That said, he admits live selling is effective because it “caters for our need to engage with others”, and “evokes the need to buy now for fear of missing out”. Flicking through TikTok Live for just a few minutes, I see the words “flash sale” twice, hear one seller say, “Don’t miss out on this bundle” and listen to another shout, “Girls, grab them, because I feel like we’re gonna have a sell-out”.
For sellers with enough personality and stamina, live shopping seems to be a no-brainer. Tregear even gives out business cards to analogue customers, directing them to his TikTok. Sometimes he goes live after opening hours, he says: “You’re getting another day’s business in the evening.”
For Hakim, live shopping isn’t a form of entertainment or a way to connect with sellers – it’s simply convenient. “Me and my friends will be out and they’ll be like, ‘Where did you get your top from?’ and I’ll be like, TikTok.”
