UK Businesses See Significant Growth Through Live Shopping on TikTok Shop

Daisy Kelly's business was inspired by a personal problem - for years she'd been pulling out her eyelashes.

She hid her habit with lash extensions, but when beauty salons closed during Covid Daisy decided to create a serum to help her eyelashes grow back.

She started Glow For It from her mother's kitchen table in 2020 while she was a student and now her business generates £6m a year in sales.

More than 40% of Daisy's sales come from TikTok Shop UK and increasingly from livestreams.

"I think live shopping gives people that connection and interaction that we're all craving... We actually generated over £100,000 revenue in one 12 hour TikTok live," says Daisy, 27.

"It's categorically changed the trajectory of my business."

Daisy's business goes live from a studio for a minimum of six hours a day with different presenters interacting with shoppers, from showing off products to answering their questions.

"It's like having 500 people in your shop," she says.

There are a host of platforms and marketplaces now offering livestreams connecting sellers and customers, from Instagram Live, YouTube Shopping, to eBay and Amazon Live. They're all different.

Live shopping, it seems, is becoming part of everyday consumer behaviour for many.

According to new research from retail agency Savvy Marketing, 30% of shoppers surveyed said they'd bought something from a live shopping event.

"The big retailers have got to grab hold of this," says Catherine Shuttleworth, CEO of Savvy. "It's grown from nothing to a huge thing really quickly. If you haven't got a strategy for live selling, you're going to miss out."

TikTok Shop says its UK sales grew by more than 30% year-on-year in June, with live shopping the fastest-growing format.

It says it now has more than 6,000 livestreams taking place every day.

At an event in the centuries old Covent Garden market, it hosted 20 small businesses with stalls who were also selling live to customers all over the UK.

With nothing more than a smartphone, a lighting kit and a fridge full of fresh meat, halal butcher Manny Malik from Wolverhampton had around two hundred people tuning into his session.

"Last week we did a TikTok live for three hours and we sold £8,000 worth of meat," he says.

It would normally take him three to four days to sell this amount in his family shop, Malik Butchers.

They're now opening a second store in Stoke. TikTok, he says, is helping to drive his expansion.

But there are fees.

TikTok Shop UK keeps up to 9p from every £1 sold on the platform, as its standard commission.

As a comparison, eBay's marketplace business sellers typically pay between 6.9p and 14.9p depending on the category. Businesses selling on the dedicated live selling format, eBay Live, pay a combined fee of up to 8.42p including payment processing.

"It's a lot," says Manny.

"For us in the meat game, there aren't huge margins. However, it's opened up a new platform. We didn't have these sales prior to TikTok. We're not losing money, we've got enough profitability in there," he adds.

Buket Sevik, 34, founded her jewellery brand Adorina in February after quitting her 9-5 job as a business manager. Her new business went from 50 orders a month to 500 orders a week since she started live selling on TikTok UK shop in May.

She's gone from working from her dining table to live streaming from a small unit, where orders are now being packed.

"It's crazy," she laughs.

Demand is so high, she's trying to hire someone to help.

But for Buket, the best thing about livestreaming is the flexibility.

"I can go live whenever I want... which means it works absolutely perfectly for me as a mum. I can put my daughter to sleep and I can just hit go live and do some sales."

Savvy's latest survey of shoppers also found that 66% of Gen Y and Gen Z shoppers said seeing products sell out or go viral made them more likely to buy.

That's something that worries the free debt advice service, Money Wellness, which warns live shopping events are "a recipe for overspending", says external relations manager Rebecca Lamb.

"Every time you snap up a bargain before it sells out, your brain gets a dopamine hit - the same rush you get from gambling," she says.

"And because a lot offer one tap payment, there's no card, no basket and no total. Often you've spent money before your brain has caught up," she says.