TikTok Shop goes all-in on livestreaming to drive sales this holiday season

Live selling was in focus at the event. TikTok is betting that the busy holiday period — when U.S. shoppers are projected to spend $1.59 trillion, according to Deloitte — will be a key time to ramp up livestreaming on its e-commerce platform. TikTok will feature “super livestreams” with celebrities, though TikTok did not provide exact names. The company has also released an affiliate app for creators to help them build their audiences and sales, as well as a holiday e-book that provides sellers with TikTok Shop-focused tips. Finally, the app is hosting matchmaking events in Los Angeles and New York ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday that fosters collaboration between creators and merchants. It’s a strategic shift from its holiday offerings last year, which were focused on getting brands to merely test out the platform.

“It’s going to be like a massive flow of content during almost two weeks at the end of November,” Nico Le Bourgeois, TikTok Shop’s head of U.S. operations, said in an interview.

For the past six months, TikTok has been razor-focused on getting more U.S. consumers to adopt live shopping and educating brands, agencies and influencers on how to do so, Le Bourgeois said. 

“We are building a full ecosystem because going live is not easy,” he said. “It’s a combination of training brands and agencies to learn the technique of going live, finding the right talent and connecting them with the right products.”

It marks a departure from the early days of TikTok’s e-commerce operations in the U.S. when the platform courted merchants with hefty discounts and free shipping. Since then, TikTok has cut back on subsidizing deep discounts for brands, upping its cut of sales to as much as 8%, Modern Retail previously reported. These days, TikTok is more focused on training brands and sellers on how to get their live-selling operations up and running. 

In Le Bourgeois’ view, brands are willing to fund their own discounts in exchange for the size and scope that TikTok’s platform offers, which has 150 million users in the U.S. alone.

“Step by step, we are moving away from it and having more brands funding their own discounts,” Le Bourgeois said. “As they understand the power of TikTok, the size of the audience that we offer, everybody’s excited to actually step in and go big on discounts.” 

Although live shopping is still a nascent part of the e-commerce market in the U.S., it’s expected to grow 25% in China to $703 billion this year. Still, it remains to be seen if TikTok’s bet on live shopping will pay off, as only 14% of adults in the U.S. have bought something from a livestream event, according to eMarketer.

“It’s hard work, but we see the potential, we see the momentum, we see the acceleration of live selling that makes us very excited about the future,” Le Bourgeois said. “It’s actually working.”

Kelsie Johnston, TikTok Shop’s head of beauty and personal care, echoed Le Bourgeois’ sentiments, saying the platform has matured beyond mere discounting. “We’re not just saying, ‘It’s Black Friday, so we’re discounting.’ We’re thinking about what the customer is telling us, like, ‘Do we want value bundles? Do we want to have minis? Are there gifts with purchase?’” she said. “There probably is an element of discounting, but it just depends on the seller and what their audience really wants.”

TikTok’s holiday live selling push is happening despite legislation going into effect on Jan. 19 that would force its parent company to divest or shut down. TikTok has sued to block the legislation. In the meantime, TikTok is operating its business as usual. 

TikTok Shop has shown steady growth since it launched. The number of people shopping on TikTok’s e-commerce platform has nearly tripled since it debuted in the U.S., Le Bourgeois said in a presentation at the event. He added that users purchased hundreds of millions of units on the platform during that same time period. 

TikTok has plans to grow TikTok Shop in the U.S. to $17.5 billion this year, its first full year since it launched in September of 2023, per Bloomberg. But data from Marketplace Pulse suggests it’s trending significantly below that, with year-to-date gross merchandise volume estimated at $4.5 billion.

There are signs that livestream shopping is gaining traction in the U.S. For example, Stormi Steele’s beauty brand Canvas Beauty sold more than $ 1 million in goods in a single six-hour livestream on TikTok Shop, a first for the platform. Meanwhile, lives shopping platform Whatnot said that it achieved $2 billion in gross merchandise volume from livestream sales in 2024, according to a company report published in October.

Holiday perks

TikTok has changed the incentives it’s offering to brands this holiday season. During last year’s Cyber Monday and Black Friday sales, for example, the company gave brands free shipping. This year, however, TikTok Shop is offering co-funded shipping for orders, which means brands foot some of the bill, according to Mindy Yang, co-founder of TikSage, an agency that helps brands sell goods on TikTok Shop.

“Major incentives are built into marketing campaigns now, so instead of paying for your shipping, they’ll give you more exposure,” Yang said, such as increased visibility within TikTok’s algorithm.

Ana Barrett, director of social commerce at marketing agency LiveCraft, agreed. “Has TikTok explicitly come out and told us, ‘You need to focus on livestream and livestream only? No, but there’s definitely a lot of incentives geared towards livestream,” she said. 

Despite TikTok’s live shopping push, many big brands are still wary of the feature, according to one agency executive, who spoke to Modern Retail on the condition of anonymity to preserve their relationship with TikTok. That could be a pain point for TikTok’s growth plans, as the company has historically struggled to court major brands to its platform.

As the agency executive put it, such brands are highly risk-averse, and live shopping is still too much of an unknown entity.

“These brands… have huge legal teams and want to cross every ‘T’ and dot every ‘I’ — with lives, you can say or do one thing off-script, and then it’s a compliance issue,” the person said. “Going live creates a lot of question marks and what ifs.”