Social shopping: The battle for Gen Z
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 19 June 2024
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The social shopping industry is estimated to reach around $8.5 trillion in global sales by 2030. So what are the big tech giants doing to win over a generation of teenagers hooked onto shopping on social media?
We find out what makes shopping social and find out what happens when a country bans social shopping on the world’s fastest growing platform.
We speak to Gen Z shoppers, social media experts and an Indonesian business owner who almost had to let his staff go after the government changed the law around selling on social media.
Presented and produced by Sam Gruet
(Image:Livestream seller Evo Syah. Image credit: Evo Syah)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Keep TikTok. There's an app dividing U.S. politics at the moment. It's one that's led to protesters taking to the streets and politicians taking sides. |
| 0:11.6 | This is not an attempt to ban TikTok. It's an attempt to make TikTok better. |
| 0:17.0 | I don't use TikTok. I think it's ill-advised to do so, but I respect the choices of 170 million users in the |
| 0:25.8 | United States. Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Republican Brett Guthrie on the question on everyone's |
| 0:32.7 | lips. Will America ban TikTok over concerns the video sharing app is a threat to its national security? |
| 0:40.2 | I think people are just assuming that it's doing harm and I don't think that that's true or appropriate. |
| 0:45.3 | I enjoy the content. I get most of my news actually through TikTok. |
| 0:50.4 | I don't like it because I use TikTok a lot, so it would affect me. |
| 0:54.2 | Welcome to Business Daily on the BBC World Service. My name is Sam Gruet. And those, as you |
| 1:00.0 | might have guessed, are the views of some young Americans who use the app. But how did we get here? |
| 1:06.4 | Jasmine Enberg is the chief social media analyst at e-marketer. So the US Congress passed a bill that would |
| 1:14.9 | give TikTok approximately nine months to a year to either sell to a U.S. buyer or face a ban here |
| 1:22.8 | in the U.S. The concern from U.S. lawmakers is that the Chinese government could force bite-dance TikTok's parent company to hand over data about its 170 million American users. |
| 1:35.2 | The app says it wouldn't provide foreign user data to the Chinese government. |
| 1:39.4 | President Biden then signed that bill into law and TikTok as expected has sued to fight the law and remain in the US. |
| 1:49.3 | And so now we are, you know, at the very early stages of what is likely to be a pretty intense legal battle, |
| 1:56.6 | which could ultimately determine TikTok's future here. But the social media giant has good reason to want to stay in America. |
| 2:03.7 | The US only accounts for about 10% of TikTok's global users on a monthly basis based on our |
| 2:09.8 | forecast, but it accounts for up to 50% of TikTok's ad revenues, which of course makes up |
| 2:15.2 | the core of its business. |
| 2:16.5 | And as Jasmine explains, the app has put shopping at the core of its business. And as Jasmine explains, |
| 2:18.4 | the app has put shopping at the heart of its expansion. Commerce has always been, you know, |
... |
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