2026 might be the year of TikTok Shop.
After years of uncertainty about its future in the U.S., a tentative TikTok ownership deal seems to have stabilized fears that TikTok Shop would just be a flash in the pan.
And now, TikTok is growing fast. This year, the platform is expected to cross $20 billion in sales, which would make it larger than eBay and a focal point of the social commerce landscape.
Already, TikTok has quietly accrued a lot of institutional buy-in. The social app has partnered with Westfield Malls to show its content in physical stores, and it is starting to position itself as a source of food purchases. Major CPG brands like Mars and Coca-Cola have joined the likes of Maybelline and Gap on the platform.
Other big brands are expanding their TikTok presence, too. Clorox, for instance, is launching more TikTok Shops across its brands, after a successful launch with Burt’s Bees in 2024.
With TikTok Shop poised for another big year, it’s worth examining the state of TikTok Shop—and where and how your business can fit in.
Why sell on TikTok Shop?
There are a few obvious reasons why brands decide to start selling on TikTok Shop.
The young audience, for one. On TikTok, you get access to a younger and more impulse-purchase-oriented group of shoppers than you can find pretty much anywhere.
If your product is distinctly visual, e.g. clothes or makeup, TikTok also lends itself well to being able to display it in an entirely new way.
But one of the big reasons to launch on TikTok Shop is that it’ll get your product into TikTok’s affiliate marketing system.
Through TikTok, qualified users that mention your product in a video can direct their followers to a purchase page for it, and earn commissions on sales. That is, if the brand has a TikTok Shop.
When you sell your product on TikTok Shop, in other words, you just help entice TikTokers to talk about your brand more.
Even if you don’t build a sophisticated marketing strategy, regular TikTokers have an incentive to push scrollers toward your products, since they can earn commissions.
Other reasons to sell on TikTok Shop include:
- Livestreaming: You can use the platform’s popular livestreaming feature to showcase your product in a new way. This is especially helpful if your product is very visual.
- Creator power: TikTok lets you feature your product alongside influential digital creators, and the partnership opportunities are immense. Don Brett, for instance, has recommended crafting creator-led collections for your products, so it doesn’t feel like you’re just copying/pasting your strategy from elsewhere.
- Deals galore: Brands that want to run a deal have a number of options, such as a Flash Deal to drive instant purchases, a LIVE Voucher to encourage people to watch your streams, and a Shipping Fee Discount to cut shipping costs. If you’re launching a new product, you can also run Early Access Deals on TikTok Shop.
- Shopify integration: Shopify automatically integrates with TikTok Shop, which means you can automatically push your catalog from Shopify to TikTok Shop. No need to build new product pages or SKUs from scratch.
What if I’m an Amazon-first brand?
Of course, let’s get the elephant out of the room. For most people reading this, TikTok Shop will—even if it goes well—only represent a tiny sliver of their overall business.
Compared to Amazon, TikTok is very much an also-ran. To make your investments on the platform as valuable as possible, you want to make sure you successfully intertwine your TikTok and Amazon strategies.
When it comes to partnering with influencers, you might consider using Amazon Creator Connections, a searchable database that connects brands with Amazon-affiliated influencers who post on various channels, including TikTok.
With Amazon Creator Connections, rather than waiting around for influencers to post about your product on their own, you can directly set up campaigns, and make them available to creators.
Craft a budget, timeline, and a commission percentage for these campaigns.
Then, you can push them out to eligible creators. They’ll see it in their dashboard, and sign up if it fits their audience.
(We discuss how to leverage Creator Connections more here.)
In addition to linking together your influencer strategy, you should also think about how to measure the overlap between your TikTok and Amazon presence.
As you might guess, tracking the connections between your TikTok activations and your Amazon sales is tricky. While Shopify can directly tie a sale on your DTC site to a TikTok ad view, it isn’t so simple on Amazon.
You can always use Amazon Attribution to get a rough measure of how many of your Amazon sales come to you from shoppers who clicked over from TikTok.
That said, Amazon Attribution is an imperfect metric, since a lot of people who see your content on TikTok aren’t necessarily going to click an outside link to Amazon.
So what can you do?
How Intentwise can help make those connections for you
You can bring in TikTok Ads as a data source into Intentwise, meaning you can see impressions, clicks, and conversions on your TikTok ads in the same place where you already analyze Amazon and Walmart data.
Our platform pipelines this data into our software for you, and sorts it for your ease.
Later this month, in fact, we’re rolling out TikTok Shop as a data source as well. So you’ll be able to see a complete picture of your TikTok performance—across ads and direct sales—alongside the data for your other channels.
This is the first big step toward making TikTok Shop a seamless extension of your larger e-commerce strategy.
