TikTok, Amazon, and others struggle to adopt China's livestream ecommerce model in the US, as experts blame differences between US and Chinese consumer behavior
Selling over livestreams is a $40 billion business in China. But Americans just aren't responding.
Context & Ripple Effects
The push to transplant Chinese livestream commerce westward has been building for a year: TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Amazon all signaled plans to bring the format to the US and Europe in mid-2022 coverage of the format's China success, and TikTok moved first with a quiet US test of TikTok Shop that November, inviting select American businesses in.
This Wired piece lands mid-arc: the $40 billion Chinese market — where Douyin alone sold an estimated $500B in goods in 2022 — isn't translating, and experts point to consumer-behavior differences rather than execution. Notably, the same Chinese industry was already being reined in at home, after regulations darkened Taobao's top three livestreaming influencers months earlier. A later look at TikTok Shop's first year in the US suggests the model found traction eventually, but far short of its Chinese template.
First-order effects
- TikTok's early TikTok Shop cohort and Amazon's live-shopping experiments face direct underperformance in the US, forcing them to keep spending on a format their home-market users haven't embraced.
- US merchants invited into these programs get weaker conversion than the Chinese benchmarks set by apps like Douyin, raising the cost of participation for early adopters.
Second-order effects
- YouTube and Instagram, watching TikTok and Amazon struggle, have reason to slow their own livestream-commerce rollouts in Western markets rather than chase the same playbook.
- Chinese platforms' attention stays anchored domestically, where the revenue actually is — even as regulators there cap how big the influencer-driven channel can grow.
Third-order effects
- If consumer-behavior differences hold, livestream commerce risks becoming structurally bifurcated: a dominant retail channel in China and a niche marketing format in the US, rather than one global model.
- Platform strategy would then split along the same line — Chinese super-apps bundling commerce into content, while Western platforms treat shopping as an add-on feature.
The trend: Attempts to export China's livestream-commerce model to Western consumers keep stalling on behavioral differences, making social commerce one of the clearest cases where a proven Chinese internet playbook does not travel.