4 hours ago
3
Media|Faux Jewels and Slimming Belts: Why Shopping on TikTok Is a Lot Like QVC
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/25/business/media/tiktok-shop-black-friday.html
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.
The popular app’s online marketplace is growing rapidly in the United States, driven by TikTok’s popularity and influencer advertisements that look a lot like TV infomercials.
Video
Nov. 25, 2025Updated 8:29 a.m. ET
Decades ago, QVC hosts would finish up their breathless pitches of Diamonique jewelry 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 years in, 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.
TikTok Shop’s rapid growth reflects just how powerful the app is in the country, where it counts some 170 million users. It has ascended despite questions about the app’s future in the United States, where a federal law to ban the app unless it finds a new, non-Chinese owner still looms, even after multiple delays. And it has persisted amid pressures from President Trump’s global trade war.
