Walmart to Hold Shoppable Fashion Event Friday on TikTok, a US First

Walmart is breaking new ground with plans to hold a “livestream shopping experience” Friday on video-sharing social networking site TikTok. During a Walmart livestream, beginning at 8 p.m. EST, TikTok users can shop for Walmart fashion items featured in content from popular TikTok creators “without ever having to leave the platform,” blogged William White, Walmart U.S. chief marketing officer, Thursday.

When TikTok began exploring a new shoppable product, “we jumped in to pilot the solution,” White said. During the event, TikTok users will be able to tap on a product when they see an item they want to buy, making it easy to “add the item to their cart and check out” while watching the show, he said.

It’s the first shoppable TikTok livestream in the U.S. market, giving Walmart “a new way to engage with users and reach potential new customers,” White said. It’s also a learning experience for the retailer: “We’re excited to engage with TikTok on this new experience and learn what’s possible for shopping on a platform that brings its community so much joy,” he said. “We can’t wait to see what we learn” from likes, comments, shares and purchases, he said.

The show is also a way for Walmart to push its private-label brands. In addition to well-known vendor brands Champion, Jordache, Kendall + Kylie, the show will feature Walmart’s store brands Free Assembly, Scoop and Sofia Jeans, said the retailer. The virtual event will include appearances by 10 TikTok creators including Michael Le, @justmaiko, who boasts 43 million followers. During the “Holiday Shop-Along Spectacular,” the creators will model Walmart apparel in different ways: through an inside look at their closet, a living room runway show or “fashion-forward dance-off,” White said.

Meanwhile, Walmart is stepping up efforts to combat bots that are scooping up hard-to-come-by PlayStation 5 and next-gen Xbox game consoles, blogged Jerry Geisler, chief information security officer-Walmart Global Tech, Tuesday. Higher-than-normal online shopping volume due to COVID-19 and the seven-year-release cycle of the consoles, combined to create Walmart.com traffic patterns “we’ve previously never seen,” Geisler said. Additional traffic has come from what he called “grinch bots” used by resellers that can “complete many transactions before a human has the chance to complete one.” Walmart is working to detect bots and prevent them from making purchases even as bot scripts are constantly evolving and being re-written, he said: “We’ve built, deployed and are continuously updating our own bot detection tools allowing us to successfully block the vast majority of bots we see.”

One preventative action implemented before the Nov. 25 PS 5 release event blocked more than 20 million bot attempts within the first 30 minutes, “a fraction of what our systems deal with continually,” Geisler said. Walmart encouraged other retailers to petition lawmakers to do more to prevent unwanted bots on e-commerce sites “so customers have equal access to the products they want.”