China’s TikTok ‘live’ sellers could pay price as Indonesia mulls ban on sale of goods on social media

Indonesia is planning to ban goods transactions on social media under new trade regulations, the deputy trade minister told a parliamentary hearing on Tuesday.

Current trade regulations do not specifically cover direct transactions on social media. “Social media and social commerce cannot be combined,” Jerry Sambuaga, deputy minister of trade, told the parliament, using the example of sellers using “live” features on the short video platform TikTok to sell goods.

Meta’s Facebook, which also has a marketplace feature in its platform, also did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment in an email.

TikTok is owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance. The company said that its app had 325 million Southeast Asian users that were active every month, of whom 125 million were in Indonesia. The company has said that there were 2 million small businesses on TikTok Shop in Indonesia.

Indonesia’s e-commerce sector is expected to grow to US $95 billion by 2025, according to a 2022 industry report by Alphabet’s Google, Temasek Holdings and Bain & Company.