Despite the sales opportunity, many dinner attendees expressed the challenges involved with operating and staffing the team needed to gain traction on TikTok Shop. Many said it requires a multi-faceted team that can simultaneously handle affiliate, marketing, sales, influencer and social duties. “Everyone kind of owns it. … It touches every department,” one attendee said.

Below are attendees’ comments about how they’re approaching TikTok Shop. Excerpts have been edited for clarity.

Brands are approaching building out TikTok Shop teams

“Everyone kind of owns it. One person tries to own it, but it touches every department, so it gets messy. It’s influencers, but it’s not the same kind of influencer, which means it’s not really the same influencer KPIs. It’s also sales, and it’s social — so, it’s a work in progress but it’s also fun because no one really knows how to do it. This is new, uncharted territory.”

“We just launched a TikTok Shop about a month ago, and we have our e-comm, our sales and our influencer team [invovled]. We look at it as a sales channel first and foremost, so the team that runs all our affiliate marketing also runs TikTok Shop. But then, we [also] need our influencer team to be in there to identify the creator piece of it, because they’re accepting creators — they can sign up, request products and be an affiliate for you. Lastly, there’s the social piece of it. If you’re doing TikTok Shop lives, then you need the social team to set up the QVC-esque format and film all the things. It becomes this cross-functional endeavor.”

On choosing the right influencer partners and content format

“You have to [figure out the sweet spot] of protecting your brand but then also looking at the content and saying, ‘OK, well, this is what’s working for their channel, and this is actually driving sales.’ You have to give up a little bit of that brand piece of it on TikTok Shop and [be willing] to try something different. And that’s why it’s so challenging.”