TikTok's transformation into a shopping app is complete

• TikTok is now a shopping mainstay, not just a video feed that sometimes tries to make you buy stuff.
• Major companies are joining TikTok Shop, which is now one of the fastest-growing brands in the US.
• TikTok Shop's entry into the US market took years as it faced hesitance from brands and consumers.

It's official. TikTok is now actually a shopping platform, not just a video app with a random tab trying to sell you stuff.

TikTok Shop was the No. 3 fastest-growing brand in the US in 2025, according to a November Morning Consult report on consumer purchase consideration. The app drove over $500 million in US sales during the four-day stretch between Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Household-name brands like Disney, Samsung, and Ralph Lauren, once hesitant to sell in an unproven marketplace, all signed up for TikTok Shop in the US in recent months. Razor brand Harry's is paying as much as $150,000 a year to hire an in-house "TikTok Shop manager" who will monitor the app full-time.

While more mature e-commerce platforms, such as Amazon and Walmart, still dominate much of the US market, TikTok is quietly training the next generation of consumers to shop and watch videos at the same time.

"More consumers are using social media to buy, to browse, to look for things to buy, and that is coinciding with TikTok Shop's growth this year," Bobby Blanchard, Morning Consult's senior director of audience development, told Business Insider.

When TikTok first began testing shopping features in the US, the effort seemed modest. In 2020, the company added shopping buttons that allowed creators to link to Shopify storefronts in videos, for example.

But anyone paying attention to the business strategy of TikTok's owner, ByteDance, knew that a bigger push into e-commerce was likely.

ByteDance operates a sister app for TikTok in China called Douyin, and that platform is an e-commerce powerhouse that drives hundreds of billions of dollars in sales annually. Features that are successful on Douyin often end up on TikTok next.

In late 2022, TikTok began testing a more robust version of Shop with US sellers who would pay creators a commission to post products. The company went on a hiring spree in the Seattle area around that time, poaching dozens of staffers from Amazon to help jump-start the business. About a year later, the company officially launched Shop in the US.

Like Amazon, TikTok wants to sell you everything.

The platform's inventory includes a wide range of products, including beauty items, electronics, and pre-owned luxury handbags. The company benefits from its small army of Shop creators who appear more authentic than a brand when they hawk goods in videos.

TikTok Shop fought hard for its US growth

It hasn't been an easy road for TikTok Shop to gain its footing in the US market.

Initially, the influx of shopping videos in the feed gave some consumers the ick. As my colleague Katie Notopoulous put it in 2024, the rush of shopping content made it feel like "the algorithm is less a diagnostic tool of my soul and instead is assessing me as a potential consumer."

ByteDance's e-commerce leadership was not happy with the US team's performance in 2024, and many of the country's managers have since been replaced with executives who worked on Douyin, Business Insider earlier reported.

2025 was also challenging for TikTok Shop, which faced the same tariff headwinds and policy changes that irked competitors like Shein, Temu, and Amazon.

But 2026 is looking promising for TikTok Shop for two reasons.

First, the company's political woes may be on the way out after the company told staff it had agreed to sell parts of its US business and launch a joint venture with Oracle and other investors. Fears of a US TikTok ban were preventing some major brands from joining the platform.

Second, and more importantly, US consumers are finally getting used to buying things on TikTok Shop. It's no longer an intrusion on the video feed and a sideshow to skip past. TikTok Shop is sticky with customers and seems here for the long run.