Big-name brands like Crocs and Pacsun are powering TikTok Shop’s livestream bet — but US shoppers still favor short videos

The number of larger brands — those with at least $30 million in annual revenue — joining TikTok Shop grew 95% year-over-year in the first half of 2025, according to the company.  And major brands are continuing to join the platform, such as Wisp, the nation’s largest women’s health company, which officially joined TikTok Shop in September. Sales from big brands also rose 84% year-over-year in the first half of 2025. That bodes well for TikTok Shop’s revenue — the e-commerce platform’s U.S. sales are up 120% from 2024 so far this year, according to the company. 

“TikTok is a necessary part of our business now. We’ve got stores, we’ve got our website, and we’ve got social commerce,” said Richard Cox, Pacsun’s chief merchandising officer. TikTok accounts for 10% of Pacsun’s e-commerce business, up from 8% in 2024, he added.

But while TikTok Shop has cemented itself as a genuine retail channel for some of the biggest brands and retailers in the U.S., it still has room to grow, when it comes to livestream shopping — these are real-time sales events that the company has poured resources into promoting by opening production studios, training sellers, and encouraging brands to host longer and more frequent streams.

Livestream gap

By several metrics, TikTok appears to have cracked the code on live shopping. In 2024, brands and creators hosted more than 8 million hours of live shopping sessions on TikTok Shop in the U.S., according to the company. A survey TikTok conducted with GlobalData found that 76% of consumers who engaged with TikTok Shop said they had bought something from a livestream in the past year. On Black Friday last year, the company drove more than $100 million in U.S. sales, with shoppers tuning into over 30,000 live-selling sessions. And TikTok Shop expects live shopping will continue to fuel the platform’s holiday sales this year.

“We’re super excited and expecting this holiday season to be even bigger,” Patrick Nommensen, head of strategic initiatives at TikTok Shop, told Modern Retail in an interview.

But TikTok’s live shopping push faces cultural headwinds. According to e-commerce intelligence firm Charm.io, which tracks product sales on TikTok Shop, live-streaming has never accounted for 30% of revenue share of sales on TikTok Shop. The format launched at just under 14% of sales in September 2023, spiked to 26% by July 2024 and has since fallen back to 18% as of July 2025.

Pre-recorded creator videos, by contrast, have steadily grown to represent two-thirds of TikTok Shop’s revenue. In other words, livestream sales still lag behind pre-recorded clips in the U.S., even as TikTok tries to replicate the $200 billion live commerce boom of its Chinese counterpart, Douyin.

“Ultimately, live-streaming is a really big cultural shift for the U.S.,” said Charm.io CEO Alex Nisenzon. “I don’t think [U.S. consumers] would ever get to a point where they would prefer live-streaming over more traditional forms of e-commerce.”

Livestream shopping has struggled to find its footing outside of China, where live shopping is a $703 billion industry, per eMarketer. Douyin, which reportedly raked in more than $200 billion in 2022 selling items during lives, commands much of the industry. By comparison, TikTok Shop, which has become one of the biggest platforms for live shopping in the U.S., was targeting $17.5 billion in U.S. gross merchandise sales for 2024.

Still, creator-driven content has turned TikTok Shop into a sales juggernaut. Charm.io data show the number of creators making sales on the platform surged from about 11,800 in September 2023 to more than 184,000 by July 2025 — a 1,400% increase. Over the same period, average prices dipped 10%, from $21.45 to $19.11, as brands leaned on heavy discounting to spark impulse buying.

Big brands go live

Despite the hurdles, major companies are cashing in on TikTok Shop’s livestream bet. This is significant because some big brands have been wary of live shopping, insiders previously told Modern Retail.

One prominent example is Crocs, best known for its clog-style foam shoes. The Colorado-based company joined TikTok Shop in the fall of 2024 and swiftly became the platform’s top footwear brand. Last October, Crocs took part in its first Super Brand Day — a dedicated event where a specific brand or multiple brands receive high visibility and engagement on TikTok Shop through exclusive deals, live shopping streams and influencer collaborations. Crocs raked in $1 million in sales, outperforming all financial expectations and also saw a whopping 28,300% increase in live shopping sales versus pre-Super Brand Day.

Since then, Crocs has made live events part of its e-commerce playbook, including a back-to-school livestream in July with Lola Tung, the lead actress of the hit TV show “The Summer I Turned Pretty.” In an interview with Modern Retail, Crocs’s Chief Brand Officer, Terence Reilly, declined to share specific performance metrics but said the company doesn’t view livestreams strictly as a sales driver.

“We want to sell as many shoes as possible. That’s obviously our goal,” Reilly said. “But it’s also about connection to customers, and doing it through live-streaming is another wonderful paintbrush for us.”

Like other brands, Crocs is also expanding internationally on TikTok Shop, including to the U.K. In the past year, TikTok has expanded its e-commerce business to more countries, including Mexico, Brazil and Italy. Crocs is eyeing additional expansion, though Reilly declined to specify which markets. “We continue to invest in this, and it’s growing,” he said.

Pacsun is another major brand tapping TikTok Shop as a live-shopping platform. The California-based brand was among the earliest U.S. adopters of TikTok Shop, having joined the platform through its beta program in February 2023. Pacsun had also experimented with live shopping years earlier on other platforms. In July, the apparel brand tested its most ambitious TikTok Shop livestream event yet — a marathon 24-hour broadcast from Pacsun’s downtown L.A. flagship featuring hourly product drops and special deals. While Cox declined to share specific performance metrics, he said the top-performing products were denim, fleece and graphic tees.

Behind the scenes, Pacsun’s livestreams required weeks of preparation and coordination between digital, product and IT teams, as well as partnerships with TikTok’s roster of top agencies and creators. “It’s a total team effort,” Cox said. “It’s not for the faint of heart.”

Some companies like PopMart — the maker of the viral Labubu dolls — generate most of their revenues from TikTok Shop lives. In June, roughly 85% of Pop Mart’s TikTok Shop sales came from livestreams, with only a fraction driven by traditional video content. In comparison, most top brands on TikTok Shop generate most of their revenue on the platform through pre-recorded videos. In other words, PopMart is the exception, not the rule. As Charm.io’s Nisenzon put it, “That’s quite different from how most shops sell on TikTok.”

Building a reliable marketplace

While buy-in from major brands shows TikTok Shop’s bet on live shopping has gained momentum over the last two years, the platform is also focused on smoothing out some of the operational headaches that sellers have previously experienced. TikTok says it has introduced a series of updates meant to make onboarding and day-to-day selling more straightforward. According to TikTok Shop, those changes include an address pre-check tool to cut down on rejections and new step-by-step resources in its Seller Center and blog to help merchants through the setup process.

At the same time, TikTok has taken steps to reduce counterfeit activity on the platform, a common problem on third-party marketplaces in general. TikTok says it has invested more than $1 billion in tools, technologies and people, in order to protect customers, sellers, brands and its marketplace from counterfeit activities, fraudulent behavior and other instances of abuse.

For example, TikTok Shop has implemented measures for Intellectual Property Rights Policy (IPR) protection by utilizing algorithms and machine learning technologies, based on information provided by customers and brand owners, or other sources, in their notice and takedown requests. Between July 2024 and December 2024, TikTok Shop says it prevented more than 7.5 million products from being listed for IPR violations.

TikTok sees these operational fixes as crucial to the growth of social commerce in the U.S. — and to making live shopping a stronger sales engine for brands.

“Users are finding products on TikTok Shop in ways that they can’t on other platforms, and merchants of all sizes are able to connect with their target audience in ways they’re not able to do on other platforms,” Nommensen said. “Big brands are taking note of this, and they’re joining.”