According to U.S. credit and debit card transaction data from Consumer Edge, TikTok Shop's July spend in the U.S. surpassed the online sales of major retailers including Target, Costco, and Home Depot, as reported by Business Insider.
In absolute terms the gap with Amazon remains enormous. The signal is the slope: 0.8 percentage points of share gained in a single year in a mature U.S. e-commerce market is unusual.
No single lever explains this. TikTok pushed on several parts of the commerce stack at once.
The last one is the differentiator. On TikTok Shop, discovery happens in the feed, not in a search box. A seller who cannot produce video does not sell, which makes creative support a form of infrastructure.
The top 5% of buyers account for roughly 30% of total spend — heavy concentration among repeat purchasers. For a brand entering the platform, that reads as a directive: reaching a small set of repeat buyers matters more than broad reach. Starting in categories with natural repurchase cycles is more efficient than spreading thin.
Spending among consumers 35 and older is rising. If your commerce plan wrote TikTok off as a teen platform, the premise needs revisiting. A widening shopper base means the category ceiling is moving too.
This is a U.S. market story, but the mechanism travels. Discovery inside content and checkout inside the app is the direction most platforms are heading. For the parallel shift in where product discovery begins, see AI Became the First Step in Shopping.
The regulatory environment has also changed following the lifting of the U.S. federal device ban — background in The U.S. Federal Device TikTok Ban Is Gone.
About 2% of U.S. online retail spend, up from roughly 1.2% a year earlier. Amazon holds about 35% and Walmart about 7%.
Based on Consumer Edge card transaction data, TikTok Shop's U.S. spend exceeded the online sales of Target, Costco, and Home Depot.
Hundreds of thousands of sellers onboarded, stronger shipping and logistics, membership and free-shipping incentives, and video production and advertising support for sellers.
The top 5% of buyers generate about 30% of spend, and spending among consumers 35 and older is growing, widening the platform's shopper demographic.
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