It's a bold vision. So far the most profitable business model of social media platforms has been to sell advertisement to their users / audience and also experi

It's a bold vision. So far the most profitable business model of social media platforms has been to sell advertisement to their users / audience and also experiment with selling subscriptions to access content. TikTok's vision seems to be create an additional revenue stream by (perhaps) enabling their platform to also support directly selling stuff. For those thinking that it is a stupid idea, note that Instagram (and to a lesser extent TikTok, Youtube and Facebook) is already a huge platform for retail fashion. Today's generation turn to these social media platform to search for dresses, shoes, accessories etc and to find where they are sold. (And retail fashion is a segment where the profit margins are very high). There's also already a huge existing market of teenagers and adults who shop a lot on AliExpress for daily wears and imitations of high end fashion items. I can see how TikTok could attract these kinds of users to their store easily, if properly executed and marketed. People who like to research products are also ideal targets - even Amazon supports product videos on their product pages for this reason. TikTok, being a video platform has a better advantage here as it can have more and better content that users may trust more than an a video on Amazon itself.