TikTok Owner Bytedance Is Building An International Shopping Platform To Take On Amazon

ByteDance is planning on building an international shopping platform, according to local Chinese outlets and dozens of job openings it recently posted. Details on the project thus far are relatively scant.

A few weeks back, the Chinese-language outlet The Passage reported that the company had plans to release a standalone e-commerce app sometime this month. Sources familiar with the project likened it to AliExpress, the direct-to-consumer marketplace which is owned by the massive commerce company Alibaba.

This planned platform has been in the works for a while. Around the same time TikTok teased shoppable ads on its platform to prospective partners stateside, its Chinese equivalent, Douyin, rolled out in-app commerce and in-app payments to its users across the country.