TikTok Shop Overtakes Sephora

Hi there,

TikTok Shop overtook Sephora to become the biggest beauty retailer in America.

When I read that line from Lisa Buchan, I knew it'd be the perfect topic to dive into this week. So let's get into the details and what this means for brands:

TikTok Shop isn't the scrappy experiment anymore

TikTok Shop hit $15.82 billion in US sales in 2025, up 108% year over year, and now makes up 18.2% of all US social commerce dollars, according to eMarketer. It's expected to clear $20 billion in 2026.

Beauty is riding that same curve, and moving even faster than the platform overall. NielsenIQ has TikTok Shop as the fourth largest health and beauty ecommerce retailer in the US, a ranking it reached in under three years, with total beauty sales past $4.4 billion. Beauty is now 46% of TikTok Shop's total sales worldwide, by far its biggest category, per NielsenIQ's latest analysis.

Sephora's US ecommerce business pulled in $3.8 billion in 2025, according to Statista's ecommerceDB. TikTok Shop's $4.4 billion in US beauty sales has already passed that. Sephora's stores still do far more business than its website, so this isn't Sephora totally losing its crown, but it is TikTok Shop's beauty business outsizing one of Sephora's two channels entirely, in a fraction of the time.

It hasn't slowed down since. Beauty GMV hit $980 million in the second quarter of 2026 alone, up 82% year over year, with skincare leading the category at $844.1 million over the trailing twelve months, up 123%. Korean brands are driving a lot of that. Medicube alone did $62.8 million in beauty sales in Q2 2026, right alongside legacy names like Tarte still cracking the top five.

Discovery and purchase now happen in the same scroll

67% of US consumers say TikTok Shop is where they go to discover new products and brands, ahead of Amazon, search engines, and physical stores. As Ajay Salpekar, TikTok Shop's head of beauty, put it: "What's different about TikTok Shop is the way discovery is organically embedded in our platform's DNA."

Beauty converts on that discovery better than any other category on the platform. 53.4% of people who discover a beauty brand on TikTok Shop go on to buy it, and once they do, they spend 55% more there than they do off platform.

Live shopping pushes that further. Salpekar notes that since TikTok Shop launched live shopping in September 2023, more sellers and creators have made it a recurring part of how they sell, not a one-off stunt, and 76% of people who engaged with TikTok Shop over the past two years have bought something from a livestream.

Shoppers get to ask about shade, ingredients, or fit in real time, which is a different kind of trust than a static product page ever built.

The part most brand teams still can't see

Here's the piece that matters more than the ranking debate. A shopper discovers a product on TikTok Shop, then either buys right there or walks over to Sephora, Ulta, Amazon, or the brand's own site to actually complete the purchase. Both are real, verified buyers. What happens to that purchase next depends entirely on whether the brand can see it.

If the sale closes inside TikTok Shop's own checkout, the platform sees it. If it closes anywhere else, most brands lose it completely. It never shows up in their ad accounts as a conversion, so Meta, Google, and TikTok Ads keep optimizing against whatever slice of sales they can already see, not the full picture, and the algorithm never learns that the person it targeted actually became a buyer.

That's most of the gap Brij spends its time closing: taking that purchase from unknown to known, wherever it actually happened, and feeding it into ad platforms as real signal, so you get real attribution and the algorithm finally trains on total sales instead of a fraction of them.

Beauty just proved how fast a channel can go from experiment to essential. The harder question is whether your systems are set up to see every purchase that comes out of it, not just the ones that happen to land in the right checkout. Discovery on TikTok Shop is only half the story if you can't tell what it actually produced, on TikTok Shop or anywhere else.

Talk soon,

Kait

A few extras:

Some of my favorite brands are hiring…

1. Walgreens - Senior Director, Client Services

Sources:

[1] Lisa Buchan, LinkedIn post, 2026. https://lnkd.in/p/gaeDnzHT

[2] NielsenIQ, "NIQ Perspective: How TikTok Shop Is Reshaping Beauty eCommerce in the U.S."

[3] NielsenIQ, "Why Ignoring TikTok Shop Is a Strategic Risk."

[4] Statista ecommerceDB, Sephora retailer data (2025 figures), 2026.

[5] Forbes, "Has TikTok Shop Become Beauty's Most Important Channel?" by Clara Ludmir, 2026.

[6] eMarketer, "TikTok Shop Makes Up Nearly 20% of Social Commerce in 2025."

[7] Beauty Independent, "TikTok Shop Nears $1B In Beauty Sales For Second Straight Quarter."