Sales from major brands on TikTok Shop nearly doubled in 2025, drawing Ulta and Sally Beauty

Major retailers want a slice of the action. Ulta Beauty told analysts on an earnings call earlier this month it was launching a storefront on TikTok Shop. Shortly after, Sally Beauty also announced that it would soon sell its wares on the fast-growing live shopping platform. While many brands and creators sell directly on TikTok Shop, big-name brands and retailers that carry multiple brands have been slower to join. 

The range of brands selling on TikTok Shop is growing. In February, PepsiCo launched its first product on the platform: a creator-led line called Flavor Swaps. The launch comes as TikTok Shop pushes further into food and beverage.

All told, the data underscores how TikTok Shop has become a full-fledged retail destination, not just a video-sharing app with a shopping tab on the side. 

Part of the appeal for larger brands is the size and sophistication of TikTok Shop’s creator network, which has become a key sales engine for companies on the platform. The number of creators earning commissions through TikTok Shop rose 146% year over year, according to the company, highlighting how the platform’s affiliate network is helping attract larger brands looking for new ways to reach customers.

“We have over 16,000 creators who are generating over six figures in sales, which really shows how far the ecosystem and the community have come since first launching TikTok Shop in the U.S. about two and a half years ago,” said Patrick Nommensen, head of strategic initiatives at TikTok Shop. “This has been a big driver of more and more big brands coming to the platform, because now there’s this community of creators for them to be able to work with.”

Big brands are also starting to test more creative ways to reach different corners of TikTok. Nommensen pointed to a recent Hershey’s campaign tied to the Winter Olympics, in which the chocolate maker launched a gold medal-themed bar and promoted it through creators across very different communities. One video featured a cyclist rewarding herself with the chocolate after a grueling workout. Another showed a mom blogger handing it out as a prize during a backyard competition. A third came from a baker who melted the bar into a dessert.

“The growth has been very strong and continues to be strong, and we see more and more big brands come onto the platform and activate in really unique ways,” Nommensen said.

Another sign TikTok Shop is growing up: brands are hiring full-time managers dedicated solely to the platform, similar to how Amazon marketplace teams emerged a decade ago. SharkNinja was paying as much as $154,000 a year to hire a full-time “TikTok Shop manager” to grow sales on the platform. Kenvue, which manages a portfolio of consumer brands including Neutrogena, Aveeno and Listerine, was also hiring a “social commerce manager” to launch “new branded storefronts” on TikTok Shop. 

TikTok Shop says bringing on larger retailers does not necessarily require a different onboarding strategy than what it offers smaller sellers. Instead, Nommensen said the company is focused on ensuring a strong customer experience as more large brands join the marketplace. Bringing more established brands and retailers onto the platform ultimately helps improve the breadth of products available to shoppers, according to Nommensen. 

“We are all focused on offering the best user experience to our buyers, and that means product depth in terms of selection, in terms of inventory,” he said. He added that things like returns and customer service are also critical as the platform grows its roster of larger sellers.

TikTok Shop’s rise in the U.S. hasn’t been without challenges. When the platform first launched in 2023, some major brands took a wait-and-see approach, wary of regulatory uncertainty and unsure whether American consumers would embrace buying products directly through a social video app. Previous concerns about a potential U.S. ban also made some larger companies hesitant to invest heavily in the channel.

But those concerns have begun to fade as TikTok Shop’s sales growth has continued and the threat of a U.S. ban has faded. At the same time, U.S. consumers appear to be growing more comfortable shopping through TikTok, as the company builds out its marketplace and adds more recognizable brands.

TikTok has spent the past year trying to make its shopping platform more appealing to larger, more established brands. Big-name companies like Samsung, Ralph Lauren and Disney, that once shied away from selling on the nascent marketplace, all joined TikTok Shop in 2025. The influx of bigger companies on TikTok Shop has raised average unit prices across the platform and helped boost its revenues in 2025, Modern Retail previously reported. TikTok also launched a new program called Project Horizon that incentivizes agencies to onboard dozens of large brands driving at least $10 million in annual sales on competing platforms, an executive at one of the participating firms previously told Modern Retail.

TikTok Shop has also tried to make the platform more attractive to larger companies by improving its seller tools and onboarding process, Modern Retail previously reported. 

For TikTok Shop, landing more large retailers could further accelerate that shift by bringing broader product assortments and more recognizable brands to the platform, potentially helping it compete more directly with established marketplaces like Amazon.

“TikTok Shop has been the first platform that’s really gotten consumers to go from just consuming influencer content to actually pulling the trigger and purchasing products in massive volumes,” said Alex Nisenzon, the chief executive of e-commerce analytics firm Charm.io. “It took Amazon years to reach that kind of scale.”