Why TikTok’s looking more and more like TV infomercials

The app’s online marketplace is growing rapidly in the United States, driven by its popularity and influencer adverts that make it look like a home shopping channel, writes Emmett Lindner from New York

- Emmett Lindner

A fusion of interactive advertisements interspersed with dance videos and memes has been key to the success of US TikTok Shop.

(REUTERS)

Decades ago, QVC hosts would finish up their breathless pitches of Diamonique jewellery and Miracle Belt “tummy slimming” straps with a familiar phrase. “Let's go to the phones,’ they would declare, as orders seemingly began to roll in on the leading TV shopping channel.

Today, QVC hosts are making the same pitch, but with a new catchphrase: “Let's go to the comments.”

That's because they're selling on TikTok Shop, a rapidly growing online marketplace within the popular video app.

This year, sales on TikTok Shop reached more than $10 billion in the United States between January and October, compared with about $5 billion for the same period in 2024, according to Charm.io, an e-commerce analytics company that tracks daily sales numbers and item prices on TikTok Shop. This fall, QVC became the highest-earning store on TikTok Shop, where the infomercial model it honed in the '90s is thriving in a new way.

It's a far cry from the numbers that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, achieves in China, where even by 2022 shoppers were spending over $200 billion on its version of the app, Douyin, according to the data and business intelligence company Statista. It's also well below the earnings from Amazon, which earned $638 billion in sales last year.

But two yearsin, TikTok Shop, which hosts hundreds of thousands of businesses and takes a percentage of each sale, is already close to the size of the online craft marketplace Etsy, which saw gross merchandise sales hit around $12.5 billion last year. It’s about on a par with eBay, which started two decades ago.