BEIJING, May 31 (TMTPOST)— Douyin, one of the most popular Chinese short video apps owned by TikTok’s parent ByteDance, is accelerating its expansion into the world’s largest e-commerce market.

Source: Visual China

In the past year, or, from May, 1, 2021 to April, 30, 2022, the e-commerce gross merchandise value (GMV) on Douyin’s platform was 3.2 times more than the same period a year earlier, and more than 10 billion items of goods sold in the year, Wei Wenwen, the president of Douyin E-commerce, said at the business’s second annual Ecosystem Conference on Tuesday. The rapid growth was the evidence of the so-called interest e-commerce’s huge opportunities, and Douyin, just at the early stage of the development, has great opportunities in the future since more than 50% of sales will come from new fields, according to Wei.

In the event’s keynote, Wei announced that Douyin E-commerce now advanced to a new phase called Universal Interest E-commerce, an upgrade for interest e-commerce, a concept the company last year proposed to refer a type of e-commerce driven by people's passion for quality life and aiming to satisfy consumers' implicit needs while improving their life quality. In the new phase, Douyin E-commerce will meet users’ diversified life demands from all the different scenarios and the whole shopping chain, and bring new developments for merchants through coordination and interconnection of multiple fields such as the short video, the liver-streaming, the online e-commerce platform and the online research.   

Douyin E-commerce’s data showed there are more than 200 million short videos offered and over 9 million live-streams launched on its platform in a month, which stimulate users’ interest and encourage them to stay, engage in and make orders to satisfy their shopping needs.

Last week, Douyin’s arch-rival Kuaishou posted better-than-expected performance in the first of the year. E-commerce, a business in small proportion of less than 9% of Kuaishou’s quarterly total sales, saw a significant year-over-year (YoY) growth of 54.6% in revenue, up from the previous quarter’s 40.2%. As of the end of the quarter, the e-commerce GMV on the company’s platform reached RMB17.51 billion, increasing 47.7% YoY.