TikTok Shop Is Helping Sellers Rack Up Millions in Sales on Platforms Like Amazon

In 2023, during a trip to Guangzhou, China, Jared Mortensen got a firsthand look at what the future held. He was visiting a factory that manufactures underwear for his brand, Real Men Apparel Co., and stopped by to see a friend who sold women's clothing to Chinese customers, livestreaming his sales on Douyin, ByteDance's domestic Chinese app. "They were selling $60,000, $70,000, even $80,000 worth of women's clothing an hour," Mortensen recalls. "I remember thinking, wow, these guys are making some serious money."

Inspired by what he'd seen, Mortensen opened a TikTok Shop account for his brand in October 2023 — just a month after the platform launched in the U.S. Today his 25-person team includes 11 livestream hosts and content creators, and he also works with roughly 2,000 independent TikTok creators who produce videos for his underwear line and earn a commission on the sales they generate. "It lets us compete with the big brands," he says. "A big brand can't operate that way with customers, because every step has to go through legal and marketing." Even so, despite becoming a powerhouse video-production operation, Real Men generates only 15% of its $10 million in annual sales through TikTok Shop — far less than the 50% it gets from Amazon and 35% from its own website. Still, Mortensen says TikTok "saved my business": during a rough financial stretch in late 2023 and early 2024, the platform helped boost the brand's visibility and sales, including on other platforms.

Michael Corrigan, founder and CEO of Trtl, a Glasgow-based ergonomic travel-pillow brand, joined TikTok Shop last summer and went on to sell $40 million worth of product that year. His sales now break down roughly as follows: about 50% from Amazon, 45% from direct sales on his own website, and just 5% from TikTok Shop — though he credits TikTok Shop for driving growth on those other channels as well.

According to Brandon Himmel, founder of the Houston-based Ruff Liners, which makes pet-friendly car seat covers, searches for his brand on Amazon have risen 26% since he started advertising through TikTok Shop in late 2024. "I've literally taken a brand doing $6 million a month and turned it into one doing $8 million a month," he says. He recently paid his top-performing creator $23,000 in a single month, mostly through sales commissions.

TikTok Shop has been deliberate about positioning itself not as an Amazon rival but as a marketing platform for small brands. In a GlobalData survey of 6,000 Americans, commissioned by TikTok, 67% of online shoppers said they turn to TikTok to discover new products or brands — compared with 57% for Amazon, 35% for search engines, 34% for physical stores, 26% for YouTube and 24% for Instagram. Of those who discovered a new brand through TikTok, 72% said it was a small brand, meaning one with annual sales under $15 million.

Patrick Nommensen, TikTok Shop's head of strategic initiatives, says the number of U.S. brands on the platform roughly doubled over the past year to 215,000, while U.S. sales volume grew 120%. According to independent analytics firm EchoTik, TikTok Shop recorded roughly $19 billion in global sales in the third quarter of 2025 — nearly matching the $20 billion eBay reported over the same period.

By comparison, Amazon had roughly 1.9 million third-party sellers by early 2025, 1.1 million of them in the U.S. Last year, third-party sellers accounted for $575 billion of Amazon's more than $830 billion in total sales. Some independent sellers view TikTok Shop as a lower-fee alternative to Amazon. "If you use Fulfilled by TikTok, its fees are much lower than Fulfilled by Amazon, and storage costs are significantly cheaper too," Himmel says. But when it comes to evaluating their own performance, sellers say Amazon still offers far deeper customer and product data and analytics tools.