Decades ago, QVC hosts would finish up their breathless pitches of Diamonique jewelry and Miracle Belt “tummy slimming” straps with a familiar phrase. “Let’s go to the phones,” they would declare, as orders seemingly began to roll in on the leading TV shopping channel.
Today, QVC hosts are making the same pitch, but with a new catchphrase: “Let’s go to the comments.”
That’s because they’re selling on TikTok Shop, a rapidly growing online marketplace within the popular video app.
This year, sales on TikTok Shop reached more than $10 billion in the United States between January and October, compared with about $5 billion for the same period in 2024, according to Charm.io, an e-commerce analytics company that tracks daily sales numbers and item prices on TikTok Shop. This fall, QVC became the highest-earning store on TikTok Shop, where the infomercial model it honed in the ’90s is thriving in a new way.
It’s a far cry from the numbers that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, achieves in China, where even by 2022 shoppers were spending over $200 billion on its version of the app, Douyin, according to the data and business intelligence company Statista. It’s also well below the earnings from Amazon, which earned $638 billion in sales last year.
But two years in, TikTok Shop, which hosts hundreds of thousands of businesses and takes a percentage of each sale, is already close to the size of the online craft marketplace Etsy, which saw gross merchandise sales hit around $12.5 billion last year. It’s about on a par with eBay, which started two decades ago.
TikTok Shop’s rapid growth reflects just how powerful the app is in the country, where it counts some 170 million users. It has ascended despite questions about the app’s future in the United States, where a federal law to ban the app unless it finds a new, non-Chinese owner still looms, even after multiple delays. And it has persisted amid pressures from President Trump’s global trade war.
“TikTok Shop has been really unique in how fast it’s developed into this behemoth marketplace,” said Alex Nisenzon, the chief executive of Charm. It ballooned, he said, “seemingly overnight from nowhere into something massive.”
Mr. Trump’s tariffs seemed to affect TikTok Shop this year. Total sales dropped about 12 percent in April, when Mr. Trump put a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on imported consumer goods, according to Charm. It has since recovered.
TikTok declined to share its sales figures or comment on whether tariffs had affected growth.
That wasn’t its only stumble this year. The company laid off a number of workers in July inWashington State, where the Shop has its headquarters. Around the same time, the head of operations for U.S. TikTok Shop left his post, according to an internal email shared with The New York Times. TikTok did not comment on those changes.
Shopping on TikTok can be a lot like scrolling TikTok. The Shop page itself looks like Amazon’s mobile app. But people can also shop straight from TikTok’s addictive feed of swipeable videos whenever an influencer or a brand itself posts eligible content. Clicking a “Buy Now” link in the caption of those posts takes a user straight to checkout.
That fusion of interactive advertisements interspersed with dance videos and memes has been key to the company’s success, analysts said.
“This idea of turning content into commerce has been tried a million different ways, and it seems to be actually working on TikTok Shop in a really profound way,” said Dan Frommer, the editor in chief of The New Consumer, a publication that tracks companies and shoppers.
TikTok itself has worked hard to boost the Shop since its September 2023 debut. It has enticed sellers with free artificial intelligence tools to write scripts for videos or even generate A.I. avatars to pitch their products. It subsidizes coupons and free shipping options for new consumers. This month, it released digital Shop gift cards.
TikTok Shop also operates nine warehouses around the country to help sellers offer faster shipping. It handles storage, packaging and logistics in return for a fee based on the number of items sold and their physical size.
The top sellers on TikTok Shop are all beauty brands, which tend to be the best-selling category of goods, according to Charm’s data.
Tarte Cosmetics, an American beauty company, notched the highest revenue this year through October on TikTok Shop, according to Charm. The U.S. subsidiary of the South Korean skin care brand Medicube was next, followed by the activewear company Halara U.S. and Comfrt, an apparel store.
Increasingly recognizable names are also signing on. Last year, Coca-Cola released a drink, Happy Tears Zero Sugar, that was available for purchase only on TikTok. The makeup brand Maybelline and the candy brand Skittles have tried similar exclusive or early-access sales.
There are also more than 170,000 local and small businesses selling on TikTok Shop, according to the company.
Megan Reep, who founded Mavwicks Fragrances, said TikTok Shop had propelled her business “to the moon.”
Before joining TikTok Shop, Ms. Reep said, her company handled $300,000 to $400,000 in sales each year, but “the first year we were on TikTok Shop, we jumped to $32 million in sales.”
Plenty of the money is also going to TikTok’s omnipresent influencers, who hawk and pitch products much like QVC hosts.
QVC works with about 100,000 creators a month, said Krystyna Taheri, the senior vice president of social commerce at QVC Group. The network offers different tiers for commission rates based on the size of a creator’s audience. Across five accounts, including the Home Shopping Network, QVC’s live sales events run an average of 170 hours a week, broadcast by different creators.
This year through October, nearly 600,000 creators had spurred sales on TikTok Shop, with videos accumulating more than 500 billion views, according to Charm. During the same period last year, only about 170,000 creators promoted products that led people to spend money.
Tracy Whitson, 55, began buying products on the Shop about a year ago and was quickly hooked.
“It’s easy to click that orange shopping cart when influencers are telling you to just click,” she said.
Crystal Stewart, 43, has been an affiliate creator for about a year, meaning she is eligible to earn commissions for posting content for brands. When she started, she was cleaning houses, which she still does. But now, she advertises the products she uses while she dusts, wipes and mops.
She tries to post up to 20 videos a day and often stays awake into the wee hours to edit content. But the monthly pay is more than worth it.
“I’ve not made under $30,000 in a long time,” she said.
Sapna Maheshwari contributed reporting.
Emmett Lindner is a business reporter for The Times.
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