Jared Mortensen got a preview of what might be possible on TikTok Shop back in 2023 while he was in Guangzhou, China, visiting both a factory that produces his Real Men Apparel Co.’s underwear and a friend who sells a clothing line to Chinese women. The friend was live streaming on the Chinese social media platform Douyin, owned by ByteDance, then the owner of TikTok. “They were doing like $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 an hour, selling women’s apparel,” Mortensen recalls. “I was like, ‘Holy crap. They’re printing money.’”
Mortensen returned home to Wichita, Kansas and created a TikTok Shop account for his brand in October 2023, just a month after the shopping platform launched in the U.S. Today, he has 11 livestreamers and “content creators” on his staff of 25, as well as contracts with about 2,000 independent TikTok creators to generate videos for his underwear line, which features pouches sized A to D, the way women’s bras are sized. (The creators get a percent of the sales they generate.) Meanwhile, a live TikTok stream from Mortensen’s home allows him to interact with shoppers. “That gives us the ability to compete against big brands,’’ he says. “A big brand can’t do those types of things with customers or interact with them the same way, because everything has to go through legal and marketing. You can’t have the same level of raw engagement.”
Raw–and plentiful. “The thing is with TikTok, you have to post a lot. It’s very intense,” Mortensen says. “You have to throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall.” Among his spaghetti strands: Videos showing which items (including a jar of salsa and a butternut squash) do or don’t fit in Real Men’s pouches. “It’s entertainment, fundamentally,” Mortensen observes. “People don’t go to Amazon to be entertained. They go to TikTok to be entertained.”
But do they go to TikTok to buy? Even Real Men, with its TikTok video machine, still does just 15% of its $10 million of annual sales on TikTok Shop, compared to 50% on Amazon and 35% on its own web site. Yet Mortensen says of TikTok, “It saved my business.” He credits it with raising his brand’s profile and sales (including on other platforms) when he was facing a cash crunch at the end of 2023 and the start of 2024.
Michael Corrigan, founder and CEO of Trtl, a Glasgow-based ergonomic travel pillow brand, tells a similar story. He got started on Amazon in 2015 and joined TikTok Shop just last summer. “The rough (sales) split right now, I’d say, is 50% Amazon, 45% [direct to his site on the] web, and 5% TikTok Shop,” he says. “But,” he adds, “I would say the growth in the other channels, I would attribute to TikTok Shop.”
That’s also the view of Brandon Himmel, founder of Houston-based Ruff Liners, which sells pet seat covers, beds, liners and hammocks for cars and trucks. “I think TikTok is growing Amazon,” he says. Since he started promoting his brand on TikTok Shop in late 2024, searches for Ruff Liners by name have shot up 26% on Amazon, he reports. “I’ve literally taken a brand that was doing $6 million a month and now it’s doing $8 million a month,” Himmel says. “What we’re doing on TikTok is driving a lot of customers to want to get to Amazon and search.” Himmel says he recently paid his top creator $23,000 in a single month, based primarily on sales commissions and earned bonuses.
7 Tips For Small Businesses Getting Started On TikTok Shop
For now, TikTok Shop is leaning into its growing reputation as a marketing platform for small brands, as opposed to an Amazon competitor. It paid for a recent survey of 6,000 Americans by GlobalData that found 67% of online shoppers go to TikTok to find new products and brands, compared to 57% who look on Amazon, 35% who use search engines, 34% who look in brick and mortar stores, 26% who search on YouTube and 24% who look on Instagram. Moreover, 72% of those who said they had learned of a new brand on TikTok in the past year cited a small brand (which the study defines as those with less than $15 million a year in sales).
“TikTok really has become this launchpad for a new generation of merchants, storytellers and businesses,” says Patrick Nommensen, head of strategic initiatives at TikTok Shop. “Our platform fundamentally represents this new shopping model where entertainment drives the discovery of these brands, of these products, in a really scalable way.”
Nommensen reports the number of U.S. brands on TikTok Shop roughly doubled last year to 215,000, while sales within the U.S. jumped 120%. The executive declined to share a dollar volume with Forbes, but independent analytics firm EchoTik estimates TikTok Shop generated $19 billion in worldwide sales in July through September of 2025, roughly equal to the $20 billion sales that took place on eBay in the third quarter of 2025.
By contrast, Amazon had an estimated 1.9 million third party sellers (including 1.1 million in the U.S.) as of early 2025, according to estimates from Red Stag Fulfillment. Third party sellers accounted for $575 billion in total sales last year on Amazon, out of more than $830 billion in total sales, according to Marketplace Pulse.
But some independent sellers are happy to talk up TikTok Shop as a potential competitor to Amazon–and one with lower fees. Eugene Khayman, founder of e-commerce trade group Million Dollar Sellers, is spearheading a campaign to try to persuade Amazon to lighten up on fees it levies on sellers. He points out that during an event hosted by TikTok in Los Angeles last fall, it celebrated reaching eBay sales levels, and said executives cited internal TikTok data, which showed the platform matching eBay’s performance after just two years of operations. “They were talking about, ‘Hey, we took over eBay in two years,’” he recalls. “So they are naming other (platforms) and they are trying to grow market share.”
Amazon sellers cite other reasons they like TikTok Shop in addition to its ability to generate name brand recognition. “If you use Fulfilled by TikTok, they have much lower fees than Fulfilled by Amazon,” Himmel says, referring to logistics services by both platforms used by e-commerce pros for storing and shipping inventory. “And their storage fees are much lower as well.”
Plus, TikTok makes it easy to communicate directly with consumers, particularly through livestreams, multiple sellers told Forbes. Amazon, they say, has deliberately erected barriers for small brands that may, for instance, want to inquire with a consumer as to why a one-star review was left following a purchase.
But Amazon, they say, in addition to generating way more of their sales, has other advantages. For example, it offers far better consumer and product data and analysis that sellers can use to evaluate what’s working and what isn’t.
The TikTok buzz is such that even some small businesses that don’t sell online are now using regular TikTok accounts (as opposed to TikTok Shop or TikTok ads) to raise their profiles.
A pair of restaurateurs catering a TikTok-sponsored event in Denver in July told Forbes that they’d generated attention and more customers simply by posting videos. “This is free marketing,” said Alejandro Flores-Muñoz, owner of Combi Taco Catering, who has been posting since 2021. At first he tried employing video creators, but found it was more efficient and cheaper to do the work himself. “Every single thing you do in your business is content,” he observes.
Tyler Kanwai said he started posting in 2021 for his Denver restaurant, TK’s Surf and Turf Kitchen, and credits it with increasing his customer base by as much as 50%. “TikTok puts you in the room with everybody in the world,” he says, adding that he also utilizes other social media platforms, but none have provided the results that TikTok has to date. “Instagram, they’re in the back seat. TikTok is up front, driving.” The app has done so well for Kanwai that he’s begun an unofficial collection of celebrity sightings and autographed photos at his restaurant, and is often recognized on the street. “I’m TikTok famous,” he laughs.
