TikTok Shop has quietly become the place where most of the shoppers are coming to for their next purchase, according to new research that puts the platform ahead of Amazon, physical stores, and YouTube when it comes to product discovery.
The findings come from a study by GlobalData, commissioned by TikTok Shop itself, which found that two out of three TikTok Shop users discovered a new brand on the platform in the past year. That single data point is what is turning heads: it positions TikTok Shop as a stronger discovery engine than Amazon’s search bar or YouTube’s recommendation feed, at least by this measure.
Small businesses appear to be the biggest winners. Of the brands people discovered on TikTok Shop, 72 percent were small companies earning under $15 million a year. And discovery is translating into sales: about 58 percent of users who found a small business on TikTok Shop went on to buy from that brand on the platform.
The numbers line up with a broader shift the industry has been tracking for months. TikTok’s own AI Discovery Engine, which powers the For You feed, now drives an estimated 68 percent of purchases on TikTok Shop, according to figures compiled by Momentum Works and other industry trackers. Products surfaced through recommendations reportedly convert at more than three times the rate of products found through search.
Sales figures back up the growth story. TikTok Shop’s US sales between January and April this year reached $6.75 billion, according to data from Charm.io, nearly double the same period last year. Small business sellers on the platform grew 25 percent year over year to around 215,000 active sellers, and their sales rose 66 percent, TikTok told Modern Retail.
None of this means Amazon is losing its grip on ecommerce. TikTok Shop’s total sales still trail Amazon’s by a wide margin, and research shows the two platforms function more like teammates than rivals. Roughly 97 percent of TikTok Shop buyers also shop on Amazon, and a viral TikTok video often sends people straight to Amazon to compare prices and read reviews, a pattern some marketers call the “search lift” effect.
That is really the more accurate way to read this data. TikTok Shop is not replacing Amazon. It is winning a different part of the customer journey, the moment before someone knows what they want to buy. Amazon still owns the moment after, when a shopper is ready to search, compare, and check out with confidence.
For brands and marketers, the takeaway is less about picking a winner and more about understanding what each platform is actually good at. TikTok Shop rewards content that stops the scroll and demonstrates a product in seconds (see Exeleon’s guide to TikTok trend and analytics tools for how brands are tracking this). Amazon rewards optimized listings, reviews, and search relevance. Increasingly, the two are becoming linked, with TikTok generating the spark and Amazon closing the sale.
