Marketplace Briefing: TikTok Shop and Whatnot notch record-breaking Black Friday-Cyber Monday sales as live shopping surges
This is the latest installment of the Marketplace Briefing, a weekly Modern Retail+ column about the ever-changing e-commerce marketplace landscape. More from the series →
Live-shopping platforms TikTok Shop and Whatnot reported record-breaking sales during Black Friday and Cyber Monday as online live selling drives more holiday spending.
TikTok drove more than $500 million in U.S. sales on its e-commerce platform Shop during the four-day Black Friday and Cyber Monday period, a record for the company, a TikTok spokesperson told Modern Retail. TikTok said Shop saw nearly 50% more shoppers who bought something on the platform compared to last year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales period.
Meanwhile, Whatnot — the livestream marketplace known for trading cards, collectibles and action figures — also reported a surge in sales. On Black Friday, the live-shopping app notched more than $75 million in single-day live sales, tripling last year’s total. One small business in the sports card category sold over $1 million in a single show. Whatnot reported a fourfold increase in first-time buyers compared with last year’s Black Friday event; on average, shoppers bought 40 items per second.
“It was a really big day for the platform,” Armand Wilson, Whatnot’s vp of categories and expansion, told Modern Retail. “We saw nearly every category having a ton of success.”
For years, platforms have tried to crack the code of social and livestream shopping in the U.S. TikTok Shop’s and Whatnot’s holiday sales growth showed the live commerce industry is gaining popularity beyond more established markets like China, where livestream shopping rakes in billions of dollars.
Still, traditional e-commerce eclipses online live selling. U.S. shoppers spent $14.25 billion on Cyber Monday, pushing total online sales over the Thanksgiving weekend to $44.2 billion, according to Adobe Analytics. But the data shows live shopping is gaining traction.
“We’re seeing more participation from brands, creators and even celebrities with live-shopping content,” said Sky Canaves, a principal analyst at eMarketer. “It’s making significant gains within a pretty short period, and a lot of that has been driven by TikTok in the U.S.”
Patrick Nommensen, head of strategic initiatives for TikTok Shop in the Americas, told Modern Retail in September that live shopping, which is a major focus at TikTok, would drive more holiday spending this year, particularly as more big-name brands test out the format.
While small merchants still generate over a third of TikTok Shop’s revenue, household names are now more common on the platform. TikTok Shop has recently onboarded many major brands including Glossier, Samsung and Disney, all of which began selling their wares on the platform in time for the peak holiday shopping season.
Brands with more than $10 million in annual revenue grew their TikTok Shop sales 76% during this year’s holiday sprint, according to TikTok’s spokesperson. Meanwhile, sellers who hosted livestreams saw 84% sales growth, and shoppers tuned into 760,000 livestream sessions, generating 1.6 billion views, they added.
Beijing-based Pop Mart, maker of the TikTok-viral Labubu toys, had one of the most popular livestreams during TikTok’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale, according to the company. Top-selling products included items from South Korean skin-care brand Medicube, audio equipment manufacturer JBL and video game company Nex Playground.
TikTok, for its part, has grown tremendously since its U.S. debut in September 2023. The e-commerce company started out subsidizing steep discounts, wooing sellers and shoppers alike. Since then, prices have gone up across key product categories like footwear, luggage and bags, and fashion accessories, as TikTok Shop has shed its bargain-bin reputation to attract more big-name players. While blue-chip companies once shied away from TikTok because of a potential ban against the platform, such worries have largely faded.
Whatnot, founded in 2019 and headquartered in Los Angeles, has also achieved several major milestones this year. Wilson told Modern Retail that the company recently surpassed $6 billion in goods sold on its platform, up from around $2 billion last year. In October, Whatnot raised $225 billion at an $11.5 billion valuation, suggesting that investors are increasingly bullish on the future of livestream shopping.
Although Whatnot started out hawking toys and collectibles like Funko figurines, the company has since expanded to other product categories, including fashion and beauty. In fact, fashion, which includes everything from luxury handbags to discounted apparel and vintage T-shirts, now rivals collectibles as the platform’s largest category, Wilson told Modern Retail.
“Fashion as a whole is our second-biggest category on the platform today,” he said. “Women’s fashion and beauty are our fastest-growing categories, and they’re taking up a ton of market share.”
While online live selling is at “a major inflection point in the U.S.,” according to eMarketer’s Canaves, livestream e-commerce in the country isn’t expected to grow to the same level as it has in China. Live shopping represents 1.2% of U.S. retail e-commerce sales in 2025 and is expected to rise to 1.9% in 2029, according to forecasts from eMarketer.
What brands are saying
Lash brand FlutterHabit began testing TikTok’s livestreaming function only in February but has seen its sales on the platform grow every month since, according to the company’s director of marketing, Kate Soueid. She said online live selling has been a key way to not only boost FlutterHabit’s sales but also engage with customers in real time.
In early November, FlutterHabit hosted its first “mega livestream,” multi-hour online selling events that tend to be professionally filmed in studios with the assistance of TikTok’s production services. Over the course of the six-hour mega live, FlutterHabit generated over $5,000 per hour. The brand also achieved a 10.02% click-to-order rate — the percentage of viewers who, after clicking on a product link during a TikTok live, go on to actually place an order. By comparison, a typical TikTok live has a click-to-order rate of around 3%, Soueid said.
For Black Friday, FlutterHabit built on the success of the mega live by running multiple short streams on TikTok and saw “incredible success,” according to Soueid. Sales on TikTok have “scaled even faster in [the fourth quarter] because we’ve gotten this strategy and this rhythm in place,” she said.
Italian skin-care brand Borghese is also seeing growth on TikTok Shop this holiday season. In November, Borghese released a limited-edition bundle in partnership with TikTok-viral hair-care brand Beachwaver. The bundle sold out within three hours of going live on TikTok. The recent success has encouraged Borghese, which began selling on TikTok Shop in September, to invest even more in the channel.
“Videos are really working well for us,” Borghese COO Dawn Hilarczyk said. “We definitely have an initiative to invest heavily in 2026.”
What I’m reading
- Amazon announced that it’s testing a new ultra-fast delivery offering bringing groceries and other household essentials to shoppers in 30 minutes or less.
- Shopify said its merchants drove $14.6 billion in global sales during Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend, up 27% from last year.
- Shopify experienced an outage on Cyber Monday that locked out thousands of merchants, delaying checkouts and backend access during one of the busiest online shopping days, per CNBC.