TikTok Shop Is Now the Size of eBay
Despite the never ending drama about banning the app, President Donald Trump volatile rate regimeand executive shake-upsTikTok's e-commerce division still seeing massive growth.
TikTok does not disclose aggregate sales figures, but the price and sales volume of individual products are visible on the app. Based on that data, the analytics company EchoTik estimates that TikTok Shop sold $19 billion worth of products worldwide from July to 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 these numbers into perspective, remember that TikTok Shop is now on the same scale as eBay, which saw $20.1 billion in total sales last quarter. TikTok Shop only launched in September 2023 in the US, 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 the share of TikTok Shop in the US e-commerce is just growing slowly,” says Juozas Kaziukėnas, an independent e-commerce analyst.
What you see is what you get
TikTok Shop broke into the extremely saturated e-commerce 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 having to go through written reviews on traditional e-commerce sites.
Ivy Yang, the founder of Wavelet Strategy, a strategic public relations consultancy, says she recently bought a dust mite-removal vacuum on Amazon shortly before scrolling past a TikTok Shop video featuring a similar product. She quickly realized that the TikTok Shop version had more features, so she ordered it, tried it out, and returned it from Amazon. For 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 matters live stream shopping even more popular, at least in China, because influencers can now tout products on camera in real time, and there's little editing involved that can mask potential product defects. In recent years, livestream shopping has completely changed how people buy things in China and has become one of ByteDance's main revenue pillars. But no matter how hard TikTok has tried, it just hasn't been able to replicate that success in the US. Kaziukėnas says that TikTok Shop's performance is likely to fall short of ByteDance's expectations, especially when it comes to livestream shopping.
