TikTok Shop Is Now the Size of eBay
Despite the never-ending drama over whether to ban the app in the United States, President Donald Trump’s volatile tariff regime, and a series of executive shake-ups within its parent company, ByteDance, TikTok’s ambitious e-commerce division, TikTok Shop, has not only persevered but has achieved an astonishing rate of growth, now rivaling established giants in the online retail space. This meteoric rise underscores its unique position at the intersection of social media and commerce, challenging long-held assumptions about how consumers discover and purchase products online.
While TikTok, a notoriously private company, doesn’t publicly disclose aggregate sales figures for its e-commerce operations, insights from analytics firms paint a compelling picture. Based on visible price and sales volume data for individual products within the app, the analytics firm EchoTik estimates that TikTok Shop sold a staggering $19 billion worth of products globally from July through September of this year alone. The United States, its most critical and closely watched market, accounted for a substantial $4 billion to $4.5 billion in sales during the same period. This represents an incredible increase of about 125 percent compared to the second quarter of 2025, demonstrating an unprecedented acceleration in market penetration.
To truly grasp the magnitude of these figures, consider the competitive landscape. TikTok Shop is now operating on a scale comparable to eBay, a venerable institution in online commerce that reported $20.1 billion in total sales in its most recent quarter. The stark contrast lies in their respective histories: TikTok Shop only officially launched in the US in September 2023, making it a nascent player, whereas eBay has been a cornerstone of online retail for over 30 years. This speed of growth, achieving parity with a decades-old incumbent in just over a year in its largest market, is nothing short of remarkable and signals a significant disruption in the e-commerce ecosystem. As independent e-commerce analyst Juozas Kaziukėnas aptly points out, "We have mostly focused on TikTok from this point of view of the TikTok ban, and we have almost forgotten that TikTok Shop’s share in US e-commerce just continues to grow slowly." This sentiment highlights how political and regulatory debates have often overshadowed the underlying commercial success story unfolding.
TikTok Shop broke into the extremely saturated e-commerce landscape in the US by excelling at an age-old platitude: show, don’t tell. This strategy leverages TikTok’s inherent strength as a short-form video platform. Creators post engaging, often bite-sized videos demonstrating products in real-world scenarios—trying on clothes, unboxing gadgets, or showcasing home improvement items—and seamlessly include direct links to buy those products on the same platform. This creates a much more straightforward and immersive experience for consumers. Instead of needing to wade through potentially biased written reviews or scrutinize static product images on traditional e-commerce sites, shoppers can see real people using and testing products, fostering a sense of authenticity and trust that is often missing elsewhere.
Ivy Yang, the founder of Wavelet Strategy, a strategic public relations consultancy, provides a compelling personal anecdote illustrating this appeal. She recently purchased a dust-mite-removing vacuum on Amazon, only to scroll past a TikTok Shop video featuring a similar, seemingly superior product shortly thereafter. She quickly realized the TikTok Shop version offered more features and better demonstrated its functionality through the video. Consequently, she ordered the TikTok Shop vacuum, tried it out, and returned the one from Amazon. To her, this seamless, visual demonstration is the core appeal of shopping on TikTok. "I need to see how it works in action," Yang explains, encapsulating the demand for dynamic, visual product validation that TikTok Shop so effectively delivers.
In theory, this "show, don’t tell" principle is what makes livestream shopping even more popular, particularly in China. There, influencers tout products on camera in real time, with minimal editing that might mask potential product defects, building an even stronger sense of immediacy and transparency. In recent years, livestream shopping has completely reshaped how people buy things in China, becoming one of ByteDance’s main revenue pillars and a cultural phenomenon. However, despite how hard TikTok has tried to replicate this success, it simply hasn’t been able to achieve the same widespread adoption in the US. Kaziukėnas suggests that TikTok Shop’s performance, especially concerning livestream shopping, likely still falls short of ByteDance’s ambitious expectations.
The disparity in livestream sales between the US and China is stark. Dandan He, the CEO of CHC Fashion Group, a New York-based company that hosts TikTok livestreams for US sellers, breaks down the user behavior: In the US, approximately 80 percent of TikTok users are on the app primarily for entertainment, while the remaining 20 percent are watching shopping-related content. Crucially, among that 20 percent, only about one out of 10 are actively watching livestreams. This means, in total, a mere 2 percent of TikTok traffic in the US is directed towards livestream shopping content. This pales in comparison to China, where, as He states, "livestream e-commerce accounts for nearly 50 percent of all Douyin traffic," referring to the Chinese version of TikTok. This fundamental difference in consumer engagement highlights a significant cultural and behavioral gap. TikTok declined to share precise sales figures specifically for TikTok Shop livestreams but spokesperson Kathryn Hull noted in an email that TikTok Shop live shopping sessions were up 72 percent year over year in September, and overall sales were up 120 percent year over year in June, indicating growth, albeit from a smaller base for livestreams.
Having reported on Chinese platforms’ attempts to bring livestream shopping to the US since 2020, I’ve grown increasingly skeptical of their ability to succeed on the same scale as in Asia. Part of the problem lies in the perceived quality and style of livestream e-commerce content on TikTok in the US today, which many find magnitudes more boring than what Chinese consumers are accustomed to on Douyin. Many in the West still treat TikTok live as a mere "QVC in vertical format," a rehashed version of traditional home shopping channels. However, younger, digitally native audiences are simply not interested in watching QVC remade for phone screens. In China, by contrast, many top shopping livestreams function more like variety shows, incorporating elements of comedy, sensational stunts, and featuring high-profile celebrities, making the shopping experience highly entertaining and engaging.
As Ivy Yang illustrates, in China, "there’s this sense of novelty: ‘Oh my god, it’s literally a public intellectual selling me facemasks.’ That is innovation." She questions the feasibility of replicating this in the US, asking, "Can you imagine Taylor Swift or Travis Kelce going on livestream and selling things to you here? That would not happen." This highlights a cultural barrier where Western celebrities generally maintain a greater distance from direct product sales on live platforms, unlike their Asian counterparts who often embrace such opportunities as extensions of their brand.
Another significant issue hindering the adoption of livestreaming on TikTok Shop in the US is that it remains a strategy primarily used by Chinese brands targeting overseas markets. These sellers often struggle to overcome inherent cultural and language barriers, making it difficult to create content that genuinely resonates with American consumers. Felicity Zhang, a Houston-based TikTok Shop seller originally from China, has witnessed this firsthand. She previously worked at TikTok recruiting and training livestreamers but now runs her own brand on the platform. She notes that TikTok Shop has such a high concentration of China-based sellers that "when you scroll the livestreams, it feels like you are in Yiwu," a Chinese manufacturing hub renowned for producing a vast array of inexpensive plastic knickknacks and consumer goods. This overwhelming presence of foreign sellers, often with limited understanding of American consumer preferences and communication styles, can dilute the user experience for local shoppers.
TikTok has been tightening its merchant registration rules, ostensibly to limit the influx of overseas sellers and ensure product quality and compliance. However, Zhang observes that this has ironically made it harder for genuine small American businesses to get onboard, further slowing domestic adoption and the cultivation of local content creators who might better understand the US market. While TikTok spokesperson Kathryn Hull stated that the platform carefully vets merchants and declined 1.4 million new seller applications in the first half of 2025, she did not specifically address whether these rules were designed to screen out non-US sellers or their indirect impact on American small businesses.
While the US market presents unique challenges for livestream shopping, TikTok Shop is experiencing significantly greater success in Southeast Asia. The platform’s top-performing markets in the third quarter, aside from the US, were Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. While none of these countries individually outsell the US, their combined performance represents a larger and more cohesive success story for TikTok. Crucially, livestream e-commerce is resonating much more deeply with consumers in this region. A striking example occurred in October when one Thai influencer sold over $17 million worth of products, predominantly cosmetics and supplements, during an epic six-day TikTok broadcast marathon that featured numerous Thai celebrities.
"It’s now mainstream across Thailand and Southeast Asia," says Warin Tinprapa, the chief growth officer at MI Group, a Thai social media marketing agency. She explains that the livestream shopping model "fits perfectly with the region’s shopping-as-entertainment culture and mobile-first habits." There are several compelling reasons why Southeast Asia has proved to be a more fertile ground for TikTok Shop. First, consumer behavior in the region more closely mirrors that of China, with a strong appetite for interactive, influencer-driven commerce. Second, competition from entrenched local companies and global tech giants like Amazon is less intense than in the US, creating a more open field for TikTok to innovate. Finally, TikTok’s aggressive low-price strategy, often featuring flash sales and discounts, aligns perfectly with local consumption habits and economic realities in many Southeast Asian countries, making it an attractive platform for bargain-hunting consumers.
The one major takeaway from all these observations and conversations is that TikTok Shop in the US is fundamentally different from what Douyin is in China. The aspiration to replicate Douyin’s livestreaming dominance in the West has, so far, largely proven elusive. However, TikTok has demonstrably found new, albeit adapted, strategies that have allowed it to steadily embed itself into the American shopping market. Critically, none of the other major platforms are investing as many resources into cultivating social commerce as TikTok, to the point that many TikTok users frequently complain about being fed an overwhelming amount of shopping content on their "For You Page," indicating the platform’s aggressive push.
For sellers and brands operating in the US, this means they should continue to prioritize and effectively utilize TikTok’s original content format—short, engaging videos—to drive traffic and sales to their products. Dandan He, who runs the New York-based TikTok e-commerce agency, exemplifies this adaptation. While her company initially focused mostly on livestreaming, it now dedicates half its efforts to producing compelling short videos, recognizing where the current engagement and conversion rates truly lie in the American market.
Yet, He and others are not willing to give up on livestreaming entirely. Her hope, and the hope of many within the industry, is that as TikTok continues its exponential growth as a social media platform in the US, that currently small 2 percent of traffic directed to livestream e-commerce will eventually become a significant revenue source. Her company, and others like it, are positioning themselves to be ready for that eventuality, betting on the future evolution of American consumer behavior. "The reason we have persisted till now is to see when the livestream e-commerce traffic in the US can catch up with that in China. We are betting on the future," she concludes, highlighting the long-term vision and strategic patience required to navigate the complex, rapidly evolving landscape of social commerce. TikTok Shop’s journey in the US is a testament to its disruptive power, even as it learns to adapt and redefine what social shopping means for a Western audience.
