Is Amazon Angling To Buy TikTok? The Two Companies’ Ties Deepen
Amazon’s turning to TikTok to tap into social, and TikTok’s turning to Amazon to strengthen its burgeoning e-commerce business. Insiders say that these “frenemies” locking arms could help thwart a ban.
By Alexandra S. Levine, Forbes Staff
Asthe January deadline approaches for TikTok to be sold to an American firm or face a nationwide ban, the Chinese-owned social media giant is quietly deepening its ties to a major company that is central to Americans’ daily life, and one of its biggest rivals: Amazon. It’s a strategic move that will make it harder to shut down TikTok here, industry insiders told Forbes.
Some believe it’s a sign that Amazon is on the table as a possible buyer. “The writing is on the wall,” said Roee Zelcer, who until recently was TikTok’s head of sales for products and services for more than three years. (He left in April to become the U.S. CEO of Humanz, a global creator marketing platform that connects influencers with brands like Google, L’Oréal and Procter & Gamble.)
And even if that acquisition doesn’t come to pass, Amazon’s cozy relationship with and growing reliance on TikTok will likely make the chorus of voices fighting a ban even louder. “Now it’s not just small businesses and influencers being enraged on this ban—but it’s also Amazon,” Zelcer told Forbes. “It’s a big buy-in on TikTok’s side. It’s a very strategic move to deepen their relationship in the U.S. economy.” TikTok declined to comment. Amazon spokesperson Maria Boschetti said the company does not comment on mergers and acquisitions or on speculation.
Oral arguments begin next week in the high stakes legal fight between the U.S. government and TikTok that could lead to this country barring a foreign-owned social media app for the first time ever. In April, President Joe Biden signed into law a bill forcing TikTok’s China-based parent ByteDance to divest its crown jewel to an American company over national security concerns or face a shutdown early next year. In May, TikTok and ByteDance filed a lawsuit challenging that law, calling it unconstitutional and a thinly veiled attempt to simply ban the wildly popular platform, while a group of TikTok creators filed their own suit against the U.S. government. Now, with the app’s future in limbo and four months left on the clock for a sale, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington will hear the parties challenging the Justice Department.
In the midst of this crossfire, TikTok has been making subtle moves to further entrench itself in the country threatening to boot it. It has heavily promoted its little-scrutinized sister app CapCut, which has continued growing in the U.S. It has doubled down on TikTok Shop here, scrapping expansion plans abroad to focus instead on increasing its stateside footprint. And just last month, TikTok announced a major partnership with Amazon—enabling people to browse and buy Amazon products on TikTok, without ever leaving the app. (Users who see ads for Amazon items in their “For You” feeds can now link their TikTok and Amazon accounts to easily purchase them inside TikTok; previously, they’d have to navigate away to Amazon to do so. Once the accounts are synced, they remain connected unless users proactively unlink them.) Amazon has also urged its own influencers to do more to amplify Amazon sellers on TikTok.
“Amazon is making it more convenient for customers to shop in social media by expanding in-app shopping in Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and TikTok,” said Amazon’s Boschetti. “In-app shopping with Amazon is available for select products advertised on these popular social media apps and sold by Amazon or by independent sellers in Amazon’s store.”
“A potential merger between the two… that’s an easy two plus two equals six.”
The TikTok team-up might seem unusual at first glance, as the companies are among each other’s biggest e-commerce competitors. But there are clear benefits to working together. “Amazon has come from a background of big e-commerce; how do I tap into social? TikTok is coming in from: I’m killing it on social, engagement, and I have all these influencers and creators; how do I tap into e-commerce?” said Zelcer, the recent TikTok sales head. He described the companies as “frenemies” with benefits—two giants pursuing a social e-commerce land-grab from different directions.
Amazon’s attempt at social commerce was Amazon Inspire, a TikTok-style personalized in-app feed with shoppable photos and videos that launched in late 2022, while TikTok’s answer was TikTok Shop, which went live a year later. But the former didn’t gain nearly as much traction—and Amazon Live couldn’t match TikTok Live on social shopping—while the latter was plagued with concerns about the quality of its excessively cheap products. In each other they saw an opportunity.
“For TikTok, I’m now tapping into all the e-commerce shoppers that Amazon has, so I’m getting all that credibility, that trust, Amazon brand, which TikTok is still facing a lot of issues [with]. … For Amazon, it’s a way for them to piggyback off the virality and the fact that they don’t have a lot of Gen Z shoppers on their platform—it’s an audience that they would love to tap into,” Zelcer said. (This would also give TikTok a significant leg-up on Shein and Temu, its Chinese fast-fashion rivals that are exploding in the U.S.)
Amazon has become TikTok’s third largest advertiser in the U.S., behind only Google and Walmart, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower (TikTok advertising accounts for 5 percent of Amazon’s spend). Internal TikTok materials obtained by Forbes show that Amazon had more than half a dozen advertising accounts with TikTok in 2023, including for Amazon Fashion, Amazon Style, Amazon Books, Amazon Health and Amazon’s Black Business Accelerator. There were also ad accounts for Amazon’s public policy and public relations team, as well as for the marketing team focused on Amazon’s new AI-powered shopping assistant Rufus, among others. Boschetti, the Amazon spokesperson, said Amazon advertises on TikTok like any other company or retailer.
“Now it’s not just small businesses and influencers being enraged on this ban—it’s also Amazon.”
The companies’ deepening relationship is managed in part by a team that TikTok refers to as “Team Amazon,” according to TikTok’s own job postings and staff LinkedIn pages, spanning roles in New York, California and Washington state. Many of these employees sit within TikTok’s sprawling “Global Agencies and Accounts” group, which is led by executive Khartoon Weiss and rolls up to TikTok’s global business solutions president Blake Chandlee, who oversees the company’s advertising arm and reports to CEO Shou Chew. A large number of TikTok personnel building its Amazon business notably came from Amazon itself, LinkedIn shows, including TikTok’s Global Head of Amazon, TikTok Shop’s Head of Product Marketing, and others who worked previously on Amazon’s Influencer Program.
The approach seems to be: “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” said Julian Reis, the CEO of SuperOrdinary, which connects thousands of creators and brands to help them scale across TikTok, Amazon and other platforms and grow through social commerce. He called the TikTok-Amazon integration “a very, very smart move” on both sides. But he said that while the value to TikTok—in terms of revenue it will generate and the troves of customer data it’ll own—can’t be overstated, the collaboration could create issues for Amazon down the line.
“Where Amazon may lose out, and may lose a little bit of the control now, [is that] it could become a drug and a codependency that this is how you’re finding all your new customers,” Reis said. “Why would you ever turn off the faucet?”
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That could also provide a major incentive for Amazon to buy TikTok.
Should ByteDance agree to spin off TikTok’s U.S. entity, Amazon’s newly-unveiled partnership with the company could be the first step to a potential acquisition, Zelcer suggested. “If you look at Amazon acquiring that social platform—swallowing that whole Gen Z audience and that engagement, and integrating all their e-commerce and logistics and everything going into Amazon through TikTok—and that becoming the social e-commerce platform, that’s huge,” he said.
“And that could be a potential merger between the two. … That’s an easy two plus two equals six.”
