TikTok Shop Breaks Records on Black Friday With $500M Blitz

TikTok Shop has well and truly arrived in the US. The platform recorded a staggering half a billion dollars in gross merchandise value (GMV) over the 4-day Black Friday and Cyber Monday period, underlining its credentials as a genuine E-commerce powerhouse.

As AI takes the headlines, TikTok Shop has quietly enjoyed more brand growth than even ChatGPT over the past year.

And the record-shattering holiday sales event underlines the unavoidable fact that E-commerce has undergone a fundamental shift. For retailers, this transformation should be right at the top of the agenda.

TikTok Shop Smashes Black Friday Records

Between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday 2025, TikTok Shop grossed more than $500 million in US sales. Publicly-available data suggests that this was the largest social commerce event in US history.

TikTok didn’t report the exact same figures last year, but revealed that GMV on Black Friday itself was in the region of $100 million in 2024.

And the platform says that the number of US consumers who purchased something on TikTok Shop across the Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaign in 2025 was up by almost 50% year over year. For livestreams specifically, sales were up 84%.

All in all, 760,000 live streams generated over 1.6 billion views. Pop Mart, maker of the Labubu, had one of the most popular streams, with the SKULLPANDA x Wednesday Plush figurine ending the Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) period among the top selling items overall.

TikTok Shop achieved similar success in the UK. It sold 27 items per second on Black Friday, resulting in the biggest ever day for the platform.

Momentum (on both sides of the Atlantic) is likely to continue in the run-up to Christmas.

Across the holiday season as a whole, 90% of TikTok’s ~2 billion users worldwide are expected to use the app for inspiration and advice. 1 in 4 have either already purchased something they saw on the platform, or expect to do so in the coming weeks.

Not all of these purchases will happen on TikTok Shop, with plenty of users still going off platform. For context, overall US spending during the BFCM period was in the region of $44 billion.

But this still means that TikTok Shop on its own accounted for more than 1% of all BFCM spending in the US this year. For a platform that only officially launched in the country in September 2023, it is a stratospheric rise.

The share of BFCM revenue in the US driven by social media as a whole grew by 56.5% year over year. Increasingly, social commerce is not just an “extra” channel, but a vital part of how consumers shop over the holiday period.

TikTok’s Black Friday Bet

Unsurprisingly, $500 million GMV in the space of 4 days did not happen by accident. TikTok Shop has invested heavily in becoming a go-to destination for US holiday shoppers.

Starting from October 1 (and continuing through to New Year’s Eve), TikTok has been offering partners daily cash incentives of up to $20,000 for incremental GMV growth. It’s also awarding up to $10,000 to sellers who rise in the partner rankings over the course of the promotional campaign.

Additionally, TikTok Shop has a “target list” of creators it wants to attract to the platform, and brands have been able to earn financial rewards for bringing them onboard during the holiday period.

One major success has been attracting blue-chip retailers to the platform. Brands like Disney and Samsung have been selling on TikTok Shop this holiday season.

Multiple factors led the biggest brands to initially keep TikTok Shop at arm’s length. First and foremost, the social media platform takes a cut of every purchase: in the US, it’s 6% for most products.

With live streaming specifically, there are also some inherent risks involved. Until recently, many of the most recognizable brands have elected to prioritize greater control of their output over the potential upsides of social commerce.

But increasingly, the math of staying off TikTok Shop is simply not adding up. The likes of Disney and Samsung clearly felt that avoiding TikTok for Black Friday 2025 would simply be leaving too much money on the table.

The Maturing TikTok Shop Ecosystem

TikTok Shop is clearly earning greater recognition and prominence as a legitimate shopping destination that looks as though it is here to stay. In turn, the ecosystem around it is evolving and strengthening.

In particular, third-party tools designed to help sellers are springing up. FastMoss, for instance, has grown to 2.6 million customers.

You can use the platform to analyze which creators are a good fit for your brand, and to begin the outreach process. The monthly subscription ($59 per month for the cheapest plan) also comes with tools for optimizing your TikTok Shop promotion strategy.

Kalodata, another dedicated TikTok Shop analytics tool, has grown beyond 1 million users.

TikTok Insights from Exploding Topics

The Exploding Topics toolkit features an excellent new TikTok Insights feature too. You can now harness the powerful trend discovery tool specifically for TikTok, surfacing the topics and products that are taking off on the app before competitors spot the opportunity.

When you load the tool, the home dashboard immediately presents you with the topics that have enjoyed the best growth in views on TikTok Shop over the past 30 days. If you’re starting with no particular idea about what to sell, this alone can be hugely valuable: for instance, in the example above, you can see that motorized roller shades, hydrating powders, and smart plugs are all enjoying very healthy momentum.

And you can search and filter the data to find the insights that are most relevant to you and your store. You can choose to view products within specific categories (baby, pets, technology, travel etc.), and you can even search individual hashtags.

You can also toggle between views growth, total views, posts growth, and total posts, as well as 7-day and 30-day growth. Shorter-term trends might help you to catch a wave particularly early, while products that have enjoyed a monthly rise are backed by a bit more supporting data.

When you’ve found a product that looks interesting, you can dive into greater detail. You’ll even be able to view the top-performing relevant TikToks.

So if, like Disney and Samsung, you’ve decided the numbers no longer add up when it comes to staying off TikTok Shop, the new Exploding Topics tool is certainly something worth considering.

Black Friday Not an Anomaly in TikTok Shop Growth

While TikTok laid plenty of groundwork to make Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2025 a major success, the record revenue was also just a natural progression of a steady upward trend.

In the 12 months to June 2025, US sales on the platform rose by 120%.

And a recent report from Morning Consult found that TikTok Shop has been the third-fastest growing brand in the US this year. ChatGPT was ninth.

Incidentally, ChatGPT itself could be the next thing to transform the retail landscape. Adobe’s analysis showed that AI traffic to US retail sites increased by 670% on Cyber Monday, and tools are rolling out that allow consumers to shop directly from chatbots (not only from OpenAI, but also Perplexity and others).

But the impetus behind the growth in agentic commerce is ultimately the same thing driving social commerce: retailers are increasingly meeting shoppers where they are at. Whether your customer is on social media or ChatGPT, the challenge is to sell to them there.

In the case of TikTok Shop, it’s clear that there is a consumer appetite. The number of shops on the US platform has risen from 4,450 at launch to more than 230,000 today, and the top sellers are generating more than $15 million per month.

And TikTok has every reason to believe its US social commerce operation can keep on growing. Douyin, the Chinese version of the app, is on course to gross $500 billion this year.

Remarkably, live streaming accounts for 60% of all E-commerce in China. And while the US retail picture may not ever shift quite that drastically (live streaming sales are currently more like 5%), social commerce is finally gaining the foothold that it has long held in Eastern markets.

The Rise of Social Commerce

While TikTok Shop is certainly at the vanguard of social commerce, it’s also a part of a wider trend (albeit one that it is significantly helping to shape).

Established retailers are well aware of the shift toward social shopping. Amazon has twice tried and failed to introduce native features that can compete with TikTok Shop; the latest effort, a video feed known as Inspire, was shuttered in February.

In its place, the retail giant is chasing direct purchasing integrations with established social platforms like Meta, Snap, and Pinterest.

And while existing players seek to ensure they have a slice of the social commerce pie, whole new brands are springing up as well. One especially interesting startup is ShopMy.

Amazon may be struggling to bolt on social commerce. But ShopMy is built from the ground up around a social premise.

Launched in 2020, it’s based around curated lists. Shoppers can browse collections put together by 185,000+ creators (a mix of celebrities and influencers).

The platform drives over $1 billion a year in GMV, and has been profitable since last year. In October, it raised $70 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, making it a social commerce unicorn.

Across all platforms, Rithum data shows that social commerce jumped by 152% on Black Friday. Clothing, shoes and accessories was the leading category, followed by home and garden.

Brands Must Get on Board with TikTok Shop

Black Friday and Cyber Monday were far from an anomaly amid the rapid growth of TikTok Shop. But they might just have been a wake-up call for the brands yet to get on board with social commerce.

The figures out of China have always given a clue to the potential of social shopping. But the reality is that it has arrived, now, in the US: TikTok capturing more than 1% of all BFCM spend speaks for itself, and that figure only looks likely to grow.

Ignoring TikTok Shop now is like delaying the decision to set up an online store in the early days of E-commerce. You might still have a viable business model, but you’re neglecting an entire channel of potential sales.

Of course it can be daunting. For many retailers, TikTok is an entirely alien world.

But that’s where tools like TikTok Insights can be so useful. With the Exploding Topics add-on, you get vital data and critical context, which makes the challenge of cracking the platform that little bit less overwhelming.

Armed with the right information, you can get set up and get ahead of your competition. If $500 million in 4 days tells us anything, it is that there is precious little time to waste.

Sign up to Exploding Topics now and start making the most of TikTok Insights.