Despite the never-ending drama over whether to ban the app, President Donald Trump’s volatile tariff regime, and executive shake-ups, TikTok’s ecommerce division is still seeing massive growth.
TikTok doesn’t disclose aggregate sales figures, but the price and sales volume of individual products are visible on the app. Based on that data, the analytics firm EchoTik estimates TikTok Shop sold $19 billion worth of products globally from July through September of this year. The United States, its largest market, accounted for $4 billion to $4.5 billion in sales, an increase of about 125 percent compared to the second quarter of 2025.
To put those numbers into perspective, consider that TikTok Shop is now on the same scale as eBay, which saw $20.1 billion in total sales in the last quarter. TikTok Shop only launched in the US in September 2023, while eBay has been around for over 30 years. That speed of growth is remarkable.
“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 ecommerce just continues to grow slowly,” says Juozas Kaziukėnas, an independent ecommerce analyst.
What You See Is What You Get
TikTok Shop broke into the extremely saturated ecommerce landscape in the US by excelling at an age-old platitude: show, don’t tell. Creators post short videos on TikTok trying on clothes or using home gadgets and include links to buy the products on the same platform. It creates a much more straightforward experience for consumers, who can see real people testing products instead of needing to wade through written reviews on traditional ecommerce sites.
Ivy Yang, the founder of Wavelet Strategy, a strategic public relations consultancy, says she recently bought a dust-mite-removing vacuum on Amazon shortly before she scrolled past a TikTok Shop video featuring a similar product. She quickly realized the TikTok Shop version had more features, so she ordered it, tried it out, and returned the one from Amazon. To her, that’s the appeal of shopping on TikTok. “I need to see how it works in action,” Yang explains.
In theory, that’s what makes livestream shopping even more popular, at least in China, because now influencers can tout products on camera in real time, and there’s little editing involved that might mask any potential product defects. In recent years, livestream shopping has completely reshaped how people buy things in China and has become one of ByteDance’s main revenue pillars. But despite how hard TikTok has tried, it simply hasn’t been able to replicate that success in the US. Kaziukėnas says that TikTok Shop’s performance likely still falls short of ByteDance’s expectations, especially when it comes to livestream shopping.
