TikTok announces deal with e-commerce giant amid US scrutiny

TikTok, still under scrutiny from the Donald Trump administration owing to its Chinese ownership, has announced on Tuesday a deal with online retailer Shopify to help businesses create video ads to promote their products.

As per BBC reports, Shopify have stated that the proposed tie-up will allow its one million sellers to vend products in the form of “shoppable video ads”.

While watching a video, TikTok users can click on the ad to buy the product via Shopify. As per the reports, the tie-up will first be rolled out in the US, where the Chinese app has around 100 million users.

By early next year, the global partnership will be made available to users across Europe and South East Asia.

“We’ve seen that our community loves connecting with the brands they’re passionate about,” said a TikTok spokesman to BBC.

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Although the popular short-form video app has been asked to sell its US operations to an American company or face a ban, they are planning to expand and will take on around 3,000 engineers over the next three years, a spokesman told the BBC.

Recently, President Donald Trump has tagged the Chinese-owned social media platforms, such as TikTok and Tencent’s WeChat, as a threat to national security and alleged that the users’ data on these apps can be accessed by the Chinese government.

However, both the mentioned companies have repeatedly denied these allegations.

On 4 November, a judge will consider if the US government’s threat to ban downloads of TikTok from US app stores will be accepted.