The holiday season is high stakes for TikTok Shop, which is trying to cement itself as a meaningful player in a crowded US e-commerce market.
This year, the shopping platform crossed half a billion dollars in US sales over the four-day holiday period between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, a company spokesperson said. TikTok measures sales by adding up spend via gross merchandise value, or GMV.
That figure is a relatively small piece of the broader e-commerce pie, which is dominated by Amazon. Overall, US e-commerce spend between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday was $44.2 billion, according to an Adobe analysis of direct online commerce transactions.
TikTok Shop is a relatively new player in US e-commerce, having officially launched in the country in September 2023 after a testing period.
Last year, the platform pulled in around $100 million in single-day US sales on Black Friday. While TikTok has historically relied on small and midsize businesses to drive sales, this year it featured a new crop of holiday listings from household name brands, including Ralph Lauren, Samsung US, and the Disney Store.
“A lot of more established major brands and sellers have felt more comfortable investing in TikTok, not just in advertising, but in its shopping and commerce features, which have also become more mature,” said Sky Canaves, a principal analyst at EMARKETER, Business Insider’s sister company.
One TikTok Shop staffer told Business Insider that the $500 million Black Friday week result seemed like a win.
“Not bad for official year two,” they said.
Whether TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, will be happy with the performance is another question. Even as the company announced its nine-figure Black Friday earnings last year, internally, leadership was disappointed with the US team’s results, Business Insider reported earlier this year.
EMARKETER estimates that TikTok Shop will cross $15.8 billion in US sales this year. For context, EMARKETER estimates that Amazon’s US sales will reach about $500 billion.
Social commerce, as a category, has seen healthy growth this year.
Live-shopping app Whatnot said it drew in $75 million in sales on Black Friday this year, triple what it pulled in for 2024. And Cyber Monday purchases driven by social media were up 56.5% from a year ago, according to Adobe.
EMARKETER expects social-commerce spending to cross $100 billion for the first time in 2026, driven in part by affiliate links from content creators who drive spending on traditional e-commerce platforms like Amazon.
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