During a splashy marketing event in September dubbed "TikTok World," TikTok unveiled a series of product updates focused on making it easier to shop within its app.
The company touted in-app storefronts for brands and the launch of its own e-commerce service, in which TikTok would manage the full shopping process for certain sellers, from point-of-sale to shipping and fulfillment.
"This is a one of a kind e-commerce opportunity," Tao Baecklund, a director of product management at the company, said during the event. "Taking the lead from our users, we went all in."
What Baecklund and other staffers didn't mention was that the e-commerce push wasn't completely new.
TikTok's sister app Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok also owned by its parent company ByteDance, began running its own in-house e-commerce solution and in-app storefronts months earlier.
This wasn't an anomaly. TikTok has rolled out a slew of features that were first developed in China. Other product offerings, such as livestream shopping and in-app games, also arrived on Douyin well ahead of TikTok.
"TikTok is basically copying Douyin, so it looks a lot more like Douyin these days," Rui Ma, a China tech investor and the creator of Tech Buzz China, told Insider. "ByteDance is definitely looking at what's happening in China and trying to export it to the rest of the world."
While parent company ByteDance recently reorganized to separate Douyin and TikTok into distinct business units, Douyin has long had a meaningful influence on TikTok's product roadmap, two former TikTok employees told Insider.
"TikTok, with the penetration that we have outside of China, it's almost seen as the less mature younger sibling to Douyin," said one of the former TikTok staffers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid damaging professional relationships. The employee left the company in 2021.
Internal training materials at TikTok even enshrine the connection between the two apps. In one document obtained by The New York Times that's designed to explain to TikTok employees how its algorithm works, staffers are asked to refer to information on the "launch process for Douyin Recommendation Strategy."
It's common for global tech companies to test features in isolated markets. But Douyin's influence on TikTok's product roadmap may also tie into where some of the company's product team is based. Current and former staffers told Insider in December that many of the decision makers who have sway over TikTok's product work out of Beijing, a market where TikTok isn't offered.
The former employee said the product decisions made in China, where Douyin — not TikTok — is ByteDance's primary short-video app, have created tension among some US staffers.
"I think there's an incredible amount of frustration internally, when people who don't even understand how TikTok is a separate app from Douyin are making the decisions," the person said.
A second former TikTok employee also said that it could be challenging to translate elements of Douyin into TikTok, because product and app design experiences typically differ by country.
"Product in the US is very different than product in China, and a lot of the things that they do are just stripped from Douyin," said the second former TikTok staffer, who also asked for anonymity to avoid damaging relationships. The employee also left TikTok last year.
A TikTok spokesperson told Insider in a statement: "As a global company, TikTok's teams sit around the world, with our senior leadership based in Singapore and the US. TikTok is run separately from Douyin, with different management teams, servers, user bases, and markets of operation."
TikTok doesn't talk much about its sister app publicly, despite their similarities
TikTok has regularly downplayed its ties to China in court documents and public communications, opting instead to focus on its leadership in the US and Singapore. The company has faced political pressure in the past for having a parent company based in China.
President Trump attempted to ban — and then force a sale — of TikTok's US app in 2020. That threat dissolved after President Biden signed an executive order revoking the effort last year. But experts told Insider that ByteDance's relationship with China is still an issue of interest to US officials.
But despite this, insiders said it's likely that in the coming months TikTok will continue to pursue other product features that have made Douyin successful in China.
Douyin has released other shopping products like a mobile payment service (Douyin Pay) and a separate retail app called Douyin Box, which would round out TikTok's e-commerce offering if adapted for the US and other markets.
"The only thing that is really clear is TikTok is going to adopt some of the same features and experiments that have shown to work well in China," said Ma, the tech investor.
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