TikTok and Grab are set to collide

Jofie Yordan contributed to this report.

Swee Choon Tim Sum, a popular 62-year-old eatery with six outlets in Singapore, might not seem like a natural fit with TikTok.

Yet, the eatery is no stranger to the short-video app, which has become so ubiquitous among Generation Z.

Swee Choon posts two short videos on the platform every week, from trendy content to those featuring new menu items. For a time, it also sold frozen food products via TikTok Shop, the app’s ecommerce service, though it wasn’t as effective as other channels like Shopee and Qoo10.

Soon, TikTok could also offer additional features – like group buying and the ability to sell dining vouchers – to F&B merchants like Swee Choon. This comes as part of TikTok’s pilot program to bring “local services” to its Southeast Asia app.

In a statement to Tech in Asia, TikTok confirms that it is indeed testing local service offerings in select Southeast Asian markets, including Indonesia and Thailand, that will let users “discover new places and experiences around them.”

With the feature, called Local Services, TikTok users can click on a “Point of Interest” tag in a TikTok video to discover offerings such as dining vouchers, food delivery, attraction tickets, and hotel bookings.

“Users will be directed to the merchant’s website to initiate and complete the transaction,” a TikTok spokesperson explains. Point of interest tags cannot be used in livestreams.

While the pilot has launched in Indonesia and Thailand so far, TikTok’s ambitions for local services in Southeast Asia are likely larger. Markets like Vietnam, where TikTok’s average sales and merchant count tripled in 2023, could well be next.

Local services – offline offerings like food delivery and movie ticketing that consumers can purchase online – have been a part of the service mix for Chinese platforms like shopping app Meituan.

Such features are new to TikTok, but these have been offered in China by its sister firm, Douyin, since 2018.

As tech firms like TikTok seek to extend their online reach into in-person commerce, Southeast Asia’s F&B industry is fast becoming the next battleground.

Grab is one contender on the field. Its food delivery platform, which processed US$10.2 billion in transactions in 2023, is clashing with TikTok over offline F&B offerings as the short-video platform seeks to capture revenue from in-person dining.

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