Two years has gone by since we had then a shopify store for 8 years we recently closed that Tik Tok had an app which kept pursuing us to sell on their platform.
Finally, we decided to try it very late last year. We saw there were potentials because of their influencers and creators which are very pro-active in helping create the sale for traditional booksellers like us.
Unfortunately, just after a month when we had one product which was really getting a lot of orders, the writing was already in the wall. You are expected to deliver all these products to even about $1K or more but you need to wait about 6 months at least until you can get all the $1k sales you have delivered. As any platform they have shipping expectations they imposed and they count on how much you are late and such. But this goes back to the days on coming of ebay to wait while they have already collected the sales as they are using the payments systems from the direct consumers.
As the article below described, Tik Tok has no idea what Indie Booksellers and Publishing is about. We have an entire world of independent booksellers, authors and publishers. Studio Ghibli Howl’s Moving Castle Journal (Studio Ghibli) is one example from Chronicle Books we sell and we partner with Ingram on fulfillment with Indie. We suddenly get a violation with Tik Tok’s algorithm’s just like this article below. And guess what, the top selling product we had which was out of stock for 3o days still generate sales and our notification says the product is out of stock. How can that happen? And since we know at the end of it, the customer will be the one suffering, we still deliver them yet you wonder what’s up? I would close to say will this platform get an extension to continue selling in the United States? The first thing that needs to happen is that we need to get paid.
Affordablebooksonline News 