TikTok Shop's rapid growth is attracting prestige retailers who are now making the leap onto the platform. 

• Sephora launched on TikTok Shop on September 19, six months after Ulta Beauty became the first specialty beauty retailer to sell on the platform, with Ralph Lauren and Olaplex opening storefronts of their own this spring. 
• Best Buy similarly debuted its own TikTok Shop with a selection of nearly 10,000 products well suited to social discovery, like headphones, cameras, small appliances, laptops and accessories.

TikTok Shop launched in the US in September 2023 as a marketplace built for the kind of products that convert on a five-second video. Its algorithm made it a deceptively effective discovery engine, and personal accessories and household items became its top-selling categories. By 2026, that discovery engine has scaled into something premium brands and fashion retailers can no longer ignore.

EMARKETER projects TikTok Shop's US retail ecommerce sales will reach $23.41 billion this year, a 48% jump YoY, which is enough to put it ahead of the US ecommerce businesses of Target, Costco, Best Buy, and Kroger. 

• It will be the fastest-growing online retailer among those we track by a wide margin for the second consecutive year, and Circana projects the platform could grow from roughly 1% of US retail sales today to 10% by 2028.

Since the consumers are there, brands are likely to follow. But another story is also emerging: TikTok Shop especially works for brands willing to rebuild things they didn't expect to touch, and to accept certain trade-offs a marketing plan doesn't usually have to make.

Commerce over content is key

The TikTok Shop launches that succeed share one thing in common, according to Dan Albert, co-founder of 456 Growth, a performance influencer marketing agency: They are led by someone who owns the commerce side of the business, not the content side. As soon as the channel requires an inventory decision or fulfillment service-level agreements (SLAs), a social media team "can't sign for any of it."

TikTok Shop also grades every seller on ship speed and defect rate through its own seller's scorecard, and a low score could get a listing buried or suspended. Ignore the seller's scorecard, Albert warns, and "you're not launching a brand, you're launching a bad review engine."

Staffing aside, two other risks are harder to fix. The first is pricing that spills outside the channel. Coupons, flash events, and affiliate commission stack into a real discount "before you've spent a dollar on media," Albert said, and once a wholesale buyer sees it cheaper on TikTok, "it's not a marketing problem, it's a channel-conflict problem." 

The second risk is creative control, which loosens once any affiliate can describe a product however they want, something Albert calls "genuinely frightening" for brands used to stewarding every frame of their advertising.

The metric hiding behind the launch

Many brands are measuring the wrong thing. Mike Danford of Adverio, an omni-channel ecommerce growth and advertising agency, points to Ulta's earnings call as a case in point: "More than 100 million impressions. Not revenue." 

Six months in, impressions were still the headline number rather than proof of sales. Albert goes further, warning that the first 60 to 90 days will "frequently look like cannibalization," and that brands trusting platform-reported return on ad spend are flying blind. 

"Anyone claiming a clean number is selling something," Danford said.

He advised to track new-to-brand rate, branded search lift, and downstream sell-through on Amazon and in retail while measuring the channel's effect elsewhere, not just inside its own dashboard.

The takeaway for marketers

TikTok Shop does not reward brands that treat it solely as a media buy. It behaves like a marketplace with its own P&L, SKU logic, and attribution blind spots. The platform asks a premium brand to trade pricing discipline and creative control for proven acquisition reach. 

Brands still treating TikTok Shop as an extension of their existing plan are the ones most likely to fund, as Albert puts it, "a very expensive way to lose money with confidence."

Dive deeper: For more on the dynamics of TikTok Shop, read our FAQ on TikTok Shop: Market size, the creator engine, and how brands turn a profit.