Regardless of the unending drama over whether or not to ban the app, President Donald Trump’s unstable tariff regime, and govt shake-ups, TikTok’s ecommerce division continues to be seeing huge development.
TikTok doesn’t disclose combination gross sales figures, however the worth and gross sales quantity of particular person merchandise are seen on the app. Based mostly on that knowledge, the analytics agency EchoTik estimates TikTok Store bought $19 billion price of merchandise globally from July by means of September of this yr. The USA, its largest market, accounted for $4 billion to $4.5 billion in gross sales, a rise of about 125 p.c in comparison with the second quarter of 2025.
To place these numbers into perspective, think about that TikTok Store is now on the identical scale as eBay, which noticed $20.1 billion in complete gross sales within the final quarter. TikTok Store solely launched within the US in September 2023, whereas eBay has been round for over 30 years. That pace of development is outstanding.
“We now have principally targeted on TikTok from this standpoint of the TikTok ban, and we’ve nearly forgotten that TikTok Store’s share in US ecommerce simply continues to develop slowly,” says Juozas Kaziukėnas, an impartial ecommerce analyst.
What You See Is What You Get
TikTok Store broke into the extraordinarily saturated ecommerce panorama within the US by excelling at an age-old platitude: present, don’t inform. Creators submit brief movies on TikTok attempting on garments or utilizing dwelling devices and embody hyperlinks to purchase the merchandise on the identical platform. It creates a way more simple expertise for shoppers, who can see actual folks testing merchandise as a substitute of needing to wade by means of written critiques on conventional ecommerce websites.
Ivy Yang, the founding father of Wavelet Technique, a strategic public relations consultancy, says she just lately purchased a dust-mite-removing vacuum on Amazon shortly earlier than she scrolled previous a TikTok Store video that includes the same product. She shortly realized the TikTok Store model had extra options, so she ordered it, tried it out, and returned the one from Amazon. To her, that’s the attraction of buying on TikTok. “I have to see the way it works in motion,” Yang explains.
In principle, that’s what makes livestream buying much more common, not less than in China, as a result of now influencers can tout merchandise on digital camera in actual time, and there’s little modifying concerned that may masks any potential product defects. Lately, livestream buying has fully reshaped how folks purchase issues in China and has turn into certainly one of ByteDance’s essential income pillars. However regardless of how onerous TikTok has tried, it merely hasn’t been in a position to replicate that success within the US. Kaziukėnas says that TikTok Store’s efficiency doubtless nonetheless falls wanting ByteDance’s expectations, particularly relating to livestream buying.
