In its continuing effort to expand in-app shopping activity, TikTok is testing an option to allow users to automatically identify products in their uploads — a march toward making all objects shoppable. The test lets select users toggle to “Identify Similar Objects” within a video. When activated, the AI-powered ISO highlights matching products that can be purchased in-app. TikTok has been exploring the feature for deployment in the United States this past year. TikTok parent ByteDance has for some time been using the in-stream shopping feature in the platform’s Chinese sister platform, Douyin.

In China, ISO “is now the major money-maker for Douyin,” driving “more than $270 billion in direct product sales in 2023,” up 60 percent year-over-year, according to Social Media Today, which writes that replicating the shopping phenom with Western consumers “hasn’t proven to be so easy.”

While Western in-app TikTok user spends are up — to $3.8 billion for 2023, according to data.ai, which charts that as a 15 percent year-over-year increase — it’s still quite small compared to the action in China.

Reports began surfacing last month that TikTok was amping up the in-app shopping test.

Moving the sales initiative forward on all fronts, the short-form video app has also been seeking to broaden exposure to TikTok Shop, which the company rolled out in the U.S. in September.

“In recent weeks, sponsored TikTok Shop listings began to pop up in Google Shopping — in particular with results for beauty and skincare products,” Modern Retail writes.

But if TikTok Shop aspires to be Etsy, it still has a ways to go. Bloomberg minces no words in stating “TikTok’s scammy shop insults users and hurts its business,” writing of one seller’s use of the Apple brand name for what “are actually cheap Chinese-made knockoffs.”

Social Media Today couches the matter more delicately, writing of “some user backlash, with some suggesting that the app is becoming too commercial, and too pushy with its in-app sales elements, which will no doubt get worse if more users switch on this new product ID process.”

Consumer research by Dash Hudson and NielsenIQ “reveals strong signals for U.S. brands on TikTok Shop,” according to a press release.