TikTok is now a shopping platform in the USA

TikTok Shop has emerged as one of the fastest‑growing brands in the United States, ranking No. 3 in Morning Consult’s 2025 report on brands gaining purchase consideration among consumers. Over the four days from Black Friday to Cyber Monday, TikTok's shopping feature generated more than $500 million in US sales, underlining how central commerce has become to the app’s business model.

Well‑known global brands such as Disney (media and entertainment conglomerate), Samsung (South Korean electronics major) and Ralph Lauren (US premium fashion and lifestyle label) have all joined TikTok Shop in the US after initially hesitating to sell on an untested marketplace. Even newer consumer brands like razor company Harry’s are investing heavily, with the firm reportedly willing to pay up to $150,000 a year for an in‑house “TikTok Shop manager” to oversee the channel full‑time.

Although established e‑commerce players like Amazon and Walmart still dominate online retail in the US, TikTok is increasingly conditioning younger consumers to discover and buy products while watching short videos instead of visiting a separate shopping site. As Morning Consult’s Bobby Blanchard notes, more users now rely on social platforms to browse and search for things to buy, and TikTok Shop’s rapid growth is closely aligned with this behavioural shift.

The step‑by‑step rollout and timeline

TikTok’s commerce journey in the US started cautiously in 2020, when the platform experimented with basic shopping buttons that let creators link to Shopify storefronts from their videos. These early integrations signalled that the company’s owner, ByteDance, was exploring ways to turn attention into transactions, even if shopping was not yet central to the experience.

The blueprint for this strategy came from Douyin, TikTok’s sister app in China, which already functions as a powerful e‑commerce engine driving hundreds of billions of dollars in sales every year. Features that succeed on Douyin are often ported to TikTok, and the Chinese app’s performance made it clear that short‑video plus integrated commerce could be a highly lucrative combination.

In late 2022, TikTok began testing a more advanced version of TikTok Shop with US merchants, where sellers could compensate creators via commissions for promoting products in their content. Around the same time, the company ramped up hiring in the Seattle region, recruiting dozens of former Amazon employees to accelerate its US e‑commerce build‑out.

Roughly a year after those tests, TikTok formally launched Shop in the US, turning what had been an add‑on into a prominent feature woven into the main app. From that point onwards, the platform steadily expanded product categories, merchant tools and creator incentives to make shopping an everyday behaviour rather than an occasional experiment.

What TikTok Shop looks like today

Today, TikTok Shop aims to sell almost everything a typical online marketplace would, from beauty and personal care products to gadgets and even pre‑owned luxury handbags. The platform leans heavily on a large base of creators who showcase and endorse products in short videos, often appearing more relatable than traditional brand advertising.

This creator‑driven approach helps TikTok’s commerce pitch stand apart from standard product listings on conventional marketplaces, because the content feels more like entertainment or recommendations than obvious ads. At the same time, TikTok continues to sit alongside Amazon and Walmart rather than replace them, but its influence on how younger consumers shop and discover brands is steadily increasing.

The hard fight for US traction

TikTok Shop’s path in the US has not been straightforward, with the initial flood of shopping content turning off many users who were used to a purely entertainment‑driven feed. As Business Insider reporter Katie Notopoulos observed in 2024, the algorithm began to feel less like an intimate mirror of users’ tastes and more like a tool to evaluate them as potential customers.

Internally, ByteDance’s e‑commerce leadership was dissatisfied with the US unit’s 2024 performance, prompting management changes and a shift towards leaders who had worked on Douyin’s successful commerce operations. In 2025, TikTok Shop also had to navigate external pressures such as tariffs and policy changes that affected other cross‑border players like Shein and Temu, as well as US‑based Amazon.

The outlook for 2026 appears brighter, partly because TikTok has told staff it has agreed to sell parts of its US business and form a joint venture with Oracle and other investors, easing some political concerns around a potential US ban. With those fears receding, more large brands that had been wary of regulatory risk are now more open to building a presence on TikTok Shop.

Equally important, American users are increasingly comfortable shopping within the TikTok environment itself. What once felt like an intrusive layer of commerce on top of entertainment has become a normal part of the feed, with TikTok Shop now sticky enough that it looks set to remain a long‑term fixture of the US retail landscape.

What this means for India

For Indian readers, it is important to note that TikTok remains banned in India under the Government of India’s 2020 directive targeting a number of Chinese‑owned apps, and the app is not legally available on local app stores. While the Business Insider article focuses on the trajectory of TikTok Shop in the United States, these developments are unfolding in markets where the platform continues to operate, unlike in India where its presence remains restricted.