TikTok has paused plans to expand its rapidly-growing e-commerce business across major European markets.
A Bloomberg news report has said that the company wants to focus instead on growth in the US where it is fighting a divest-or-ban-law. The rollout of the social media firm’s shopping plaform had been due to take place, this July, across Spain, Germany, Italy, France and Ireland.
According to the report, Bytedance’s Tiktok has also put on hold plans to bring the Shop feature to Mexico and Brazil wth its leadership preferring to concentrate on the U.S, its most lucrative market with 170 million monthly users.
It comes as TikTok ramps up its fight against a new ban signed into law by President Joe Biden to counteract data privacy concerns. Under the ruling, ByteDance is requited to completely spin off TikTok for the US audience or the platform will be banned. This could take at least a year, howevr, before the ban takes effect pending legal challenges.
TikTok Shop, an e-commerce feature of the video hosting service, enables users interested in starting a business and generating income to upload their curated products on TikTok for others to discover. The firm began testing the e-commerce product in November 2022 before it was officially launched in the U.S. in September last year.
