“TikTok Shop UK is looking to establish a foothold in the parent and baby product category, offering a wide range of products from nappies, weaning sets to cots, car seats and prams via the platform. This is a sensible move for the social media giant, given it has become home to a growing community of parents, who are using the platform to share their parenting journey and trade tips with new mums and dads.

Mintel’s Nursery and Baby Equipment Retailing - UK, 2023 Report highlights how online has formed an integral part of parents’ shopping habits for nursery and baby equipment. Some 83% of parents bought these products online, with purchases via smartphones (60%) the most popular way to buy. The appetite for smartphone purchasing paves the way for the adoption of social commerce, whereby consumers can be taken seamlessly from product discovery from the initial purpose of entertainment on social media, all the way to the end of the purchase funnel without leaving the platform.

From a retailer perspective, this outlines a lucrative channel that retailers can incorporate into their available points of sales, streamlining the shopping process and incentivising impulse buying. Given parents’ propensity to trust regular people who actually use the products and bear more relevance to them, rather than necessarily established influencers or category experts (see Nursery and Baby Equipment Retailing - UK, 2023), retailers can also leverage the rise of everyone-as-influencer, whereby micro-influencers can be used to drive authenticity of promotions while allowing retailers to cut back on adspend.”