The ByteDance office in Jakarta, Indonesia. In Indonesia, ByteDance is hoping to repeat the Chinese success of TikTok’s sister app, Douyin. — The New York TimesA year ago, TikTok’s ecommerce business in Indonesia was thriving. With its viral videos, TikTok had become a worldwide phenomenon, and it was translating its influence into a powerful new revenue stream by letting users buy and sell things while its videos played.
The government’s edict did not name TikTok. It didn’t need to. No other app blended social media and ecommerce the way TikTok did. TikTok wanted Shop back online by Dec 12, according to two people familiar with the discussions who were not authorised to speak publicly. TikTok Shop restarted as a pilot program under government supervision on Dec 11. As it had before, Shop appeared as a tab within the TikTok app. But now it was decked out with Tokopedia’s logo and signature green branding.
TikTok received majority ownership of Tokopedia, which paid TikTok for the right to operate TikTok Shop in Indonesia. GoTo kept just under a quarter of Tokopedia’s shares, and was promised a cut of profits from future TikTok Shop sales. TikTok paid US$840mil and said it would invest further, up to a total of US$1.5bil, in the combined entity.
The government said its new rules for ecommerce were intended to protect small businesses. But the businesses that sold goods on TikTok Shop were caught off guard by the sudden interruption. Some struggled to get by without income they relied on. Edri, who like many Indonesians goes by only one name, has a stall on the fifth floor of Jakarta’s Pasar Tanah Abang, the largest textile market in Southeast Asia. He said he was selling about 30 pairs of jeans a day on TikTok Shop these days – down from about 100 before the shutdown last October. Edri said it had become harder to attract viewers to his livestreams, which he taped among neatly folded piles of denim while his assistant smoked clove cigarettes off camera.