• Social shopping finally broke through in the US in 2024, driven by TikTok Shop.
• Companies spent years trying to import social-commerce habits from Asia, with varied success.
• The US market is still dominated by Amazon, but social apps and influencers are key players.

Social platforms have spent years trying to get Americans to buy stuff from videos, posts, and livestreams. That bet seems to finally be paying off.

The 2024 holiday sales from social media — driven by TikTok Shop and influencer affiliates, among other factors — show how far social shopping has come in the past five years.

TikTok Shop, which had its official wide launch in the US in September 2023, reported $100 million in single-day US sales on Black Friday this year, triple what it drove in 2023. Americans viewed over 30,000 TikTok shopping livestreams that day, with one creator picking up $2 million in sales from a single session.

The company's holiday gold rush didn't come easily. TikTok and its owner ByteDance have spent years investing in its e-commerce business, even as competitors like Instagram have pulled back on shopping features.

TikTok began testing out social-commerce features in the US as early as 2020 when it let creators add shopping buttons to some videos. It began rolling out its more advanced product, Shop, in the US to a group of merchants and agencies in November 2022 after testing in other markets like the UK. It's since built out its own order fulfillment program, enlisted hundreds of outside partners to train merchants and creators on how to sell in-app, and recently began connecting creators with manufacturers to build their own products.

TikTok likely wants to replicate some of the success of its sister app in China, Douyin, which drives hundreds of billions in sales annually, often via influencer livestreams. While TikTok's numbers are comparatively small, the company has made a ton of progress this year, social-commerce executives told Business Insider.

Max Benator, the CEO of the social-shopping agency Orca, said he expects to hit just under $100 million in total gross merchandise value, or GMV, in 2024 across the company's clients, a roughly 10X increase from 2023.

"We've now been on TikTok Shop since the very beginning, and we've seen successes gradually and consistently increase month over month," Benator told BI. "The numbers are serious."

Outlandish, a TikTok Shop agency that recently opened a livestreaming hub in Santa Monica, said its Shop sellers earned $48 million in US sales in November, up from $20 million in October. The company is betting that live shopping will continue to gain traction in the US, as it has in more mature social-commerce markets like China.

"It's QVC on steroids," Outlandish's founder and CEO William August told BI.

Affiliate marketing from influencers and others drove a fifth of Cyber Monday sales revenue

TikTok Shop's holiday performance was impressive for an e-commerce newcomer, but its business remains a small piece of overall holiday sales.

Total online Black Friday sales in the US hit $10.8 billion this year, up about 10% from 2023, according to Adobe Analytics. Online sales in the US between November 1 and December 2 reached $131.5 billion, and  hit $13.3 billion on Cyber Monday alone.

Retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Target continue to dominate much of online spending, but social-media influencers and other affiliate marketers are playing an increasingly important role in driving purchases on those platforms.

About 20% of US e-commerce revenue on Cyber Monday arrived via affiliate or other promotional links, a 7% year-over-year increase from 2023, per Adobe Analytics.

Outside TikTok and affiliate marketing, other influencer-focused platforms are also reporting meaningful sales volume this year. Live shopping platform Whatnot said in November that it had surpassed $2 billion in year-to-date livestream sales, for example.

TikTok and its partners are proving that US consumers are willing to adjust shopping habits

When TikTok and competitors like Instagram and YouTube first began testing e-commerce features in the US, not all consumers were psyched.

Social media is for entertainment, not shopping, some said. Amazon and other big retailers have long dominated e-commerce, and changing consumer habits is a challenge. Instagram backpedaled on its shopping product last year, removing its Shop tab in February 2023 and eventually partnering with Amazon for its in-app shopping strategy.

But TikTok kept charging forward with social shopping. It enlisted an army of agency partners and livestream coaches to accelerate the adoption of Shop and flooded its feed with videos of creators hawking goods in exchange for a commission.

TikTok's owner ByteDance was likely behind the company's determination to make social shopping work as it sought to bring Douyin's success to TikTok.

Now that live shopping and social commerce are beginning to take hold in the US, TikTok and ByteDance's push into the category is paying off (though it all could fall apart if TikTok ends up being banned in January due to a divest-or-ban law).

"This is the year that we've seen the real beginning of live shopping in America," said Julian Reis, the CEO of SuperOrdinary, a social-commerce agency that's worked with TikTok and Douyin. "With TikTok, we've had the first real foray into building an ecosystem that ties in entertainment and live shopping together, and a full-service ecosystem that brings in the creators, the affiliates, the products, the brands altogether."

• Influencers and other affiliates drove about 20% of US Cyber Monday revenue, per Adobe Analytics.
• Posts with affiliate links were six times as likely to lead to a sale as other social content was.
• Social shopping has been on the rise in the US, as platforms like TikTok lean into e-commerce.

Influencers are helping to boost sales this holiday season — and getting paid to do so.

Social-media influencers and other content makers that recommend products via affiliate links helped drive about 20% of US e-commerce revenue on Cyber Monday, according to new data from Adobe Analytics. That's a roughly 7% year-over-year increase from 2023, the company said.

Affiliate linking is a marketing strategy where a figure of influence, such as a TikTok star or a product-review writer at Wirecutter, shares an item and earns a commission if someone buys it via a referral link.

Adobe Analytics found that products promoted via an affiliate link were six times as likely to lead to a purchase compared to content posted on social media by a brand or user that did not contain an affiliate-marketing or comparable promotional link.

This suggests that professional product endorsers are more effective at driving sales than other social-media users, Taylor Schreiner, a senior director at Adobe Digital Insights, told Business Insider.

"We're bombarded with information from all sorts of different channels, and people are finding that a recommendation from another brand they trust, be it an individual or a broader one, is of a lot of value to them in this attention-sapped environment," Schreiner said.

Affiliate marketing has become an increasingly important tactic for driving e-commerce sales as more consumers, and young shoppers in particular, turn to bloggers and other digital creators to decide what to buy. Fifty-two percent of 18- to 29-year-olds said their purchase decisions were influenced by social-media creators either somewhat or very often, per a YouGov survey conducted in December 2023.

Companies like Amazon, Walmart, and LTK have spent years building affiliate programs to compensate creators who drive sales.

LTK cofounder and president Amber Venz Box told BI that the company's creator partners were "able to earn a commission on pretty much every product that they're talking about, featuring, and using in their own lives." LTK said its creators drive billions in retail sales annually.

Social shopping has generally been on the rise this year, as platforms like TikTok introduce more robust e-commerce features, including live shopping. TikTok Shop drove over $100 million in single-day sales on Black Friday, a company spokesperson said.

Overall, consumers spent a total of $13.3 billion on e-commerce in the US on Cyber Monday, a 7.3% increase from the previous year, Adobe Analytics reported. Online spend for the five-day period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday reached  $41.1 billion. For its estimates, Adobe said it analyzes commerce transactions online across over 1 trillion visits to US retail sites and 100 million unique products, or SKUs.

• There's a new experiential store in Los Angeles that blends livestreaming with in-person retail.
• The space features rows of hosts selling products live on TikTok Shop.
• The project is the brainchild of Outlandish, an e-commerce startup with roots in China.

Welcome to the TikTok-era shopping mall.

A new brick-and-mortar store from the e-commerce startup Outlandish is bringing to life the world of TikTok Shop. It sits on a busy street in Santa Monica's 3rd Street Promenade, wedged between a Sephora and a Chipotle.

Business Insider stepped inside the two-story emporium ahead of its Thursday opening. It features a first floor of branded stalls where a lineup of hosts sit in front of bright lights and product displays as they hawk their wares to a TikTok audience. On its second floor, visitors can shop for goods from those sellers, which include brands like Goli Nutrition and the electronics company Anker.

The aim of the store is to mix live online selling with in-person retail. Passersby can buy viral products, gawk at influencers or merchants as they sell on livestreams, or even join the QVC-style streams themselves. Products and sellers will rotate, as merchants can rent out space by the hour.

The store's Santa Monica location is in a tourist hot spot. Like TikTok livestreams themselves — which are sometimes interspersed into the app's main feed — it's likely to draw in visitors who didn't originally plan to watch livestream shopping.

On Monday, the yet-to-open space was already packed with live sellers chattering away. It was loud — there were a handful sellers simultaneously recording in one room — but it was still easy to become engrossed in watching a single host.

It's As Seen on TV, but for the TikTok generation, William August, Outlandish's founder and CEO, told BI.

"This is 'As Seen on Livestream,'" August said. "I want people that come in to not feel like they're in a studio, but to feel like they're in a space where they can pop in the livestream. They can enjoy the experience. They can grab some free samples, and they can buy in-person. That's why our livestream rooms are not blocked off."

Outlandish's live-shopping concept taps into a broader effort among e-commerce startups, like SuperOrdinary, to make the live-selling model that exploded in China and other parts of Asia take off in the US. It's a big focus among TikTok Shop merchants who use the e-commerce platform to sell goods in videos, livestreams, and a dedicated shopping tab. TikTok itself is heavily focused on making livestream shopping successful in the US. The company recently hosted a summit for partners where it emphasized live selling.

TikTok and its owner ByteDance are aiming to recreate the success of its Chinese sister app, Douyin, which drives hundreds of billions in annual product sales. Features that are successful on Douyin often get pushed to TikTok next.

In addition to TikTok Shop, Outlandish has experience working with brands to help them sell on Douyin and other social apps.

How live selling could break through in the US

TikTok Shop is still a relatively young e-commerce platform, having launched in the US a little over a year ago. But it's gaining traction quickly as users become more acclimated to buying from a social app. Content creators on the app are now driving millions in sales in single live-selling sessions, which TikTok recommends should last a minimum of two hours.

In July, TikTok Shop's US gross sales began topping $1 billion monthly, The Information reported. Outlandish said it helped its partners earn $1.2 million in sales across 1,300 livestreams in a recent four-week window, adding up to nearly 3,000 hours of live streaming.

Live-selling studios are popping up in major cities like Los Angeles and New York. TikTok has some at its offices that it makes available to partners. Outlandish aims to expand beyond Santa Monica into additional locations in Mexico and Spain in 2025.

Outlandish isn't the only company trying to merge digital shopping with brick-and-mortar. Mall of America kicked off a livestream partnership with the e-commerce platform Popshop Live in 2020, for instance. Other TikTok Shop sellers have experimented with adding livestreaming spaces to their storefronts, such as the New York-based pre-owned luxury store What Goes Around Comes Around. And companies like Amazon have envisioned repurposing mall stores to service other e-commerce functions, such as fulfillment.

"This is a whole new industry that's just getting built in the US," August said. "Very soon, it will be a massive job market as well, with a lot of people that will come into the industry, and it'll be their job to be a live host or to be a live operator or to be a live moderator."

Outlandish, which began in 2018 as a social shopping agency in China, is an official TikTok Shop partner. Many of the sellers in its Santa Monica space work with the company on other parts of their TikTok Shop strategies, such as influencer affiliate marketing. But the company also hopes to draw in local Santa Monica businesses and influencers, too.

Outlandish makes money from the space by charging management fees for its live-shopping segments. It can get a percentage cut of online sales as well. The company declined to provide information on the cost or length of its Santa Monica lease.

Its US Shop business could get upended if TikTok ends up being pulled from app stores in January, as mandated by a divest-or-ban bill passed by Congress. If that does happen, August said Outlandish's Santa Monica sellers could pivot to livestreaming on other platforms.

"If TikTok does get banned, I don't think these people are just going to stop shopping through livestreams," he said.