TikTok is back – for now. But a host of competitors see an opportunity in its uncertain future to make a play for the growing number of consumers who use the platform to shop.
In 2023, with the launch of TikTok Shop in the US, the social media platform succeeded where rivals had tried and mostly failed for years: it turned scrolling through viral videos into a sizable e-commerce business. Users could purchase products – like baggy jeans and lip glosses – directly from videos.
In addition to providing a windfall of commissions for creators, the platform’s For You Page quickly became a powerful discovery engine for smaller, lesser known brands, which could hope the algorithm would thrust them in front of millions of potential customers. In the first three months after its US launch, TikTok Shop amassed over 500,000 sellers.
YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat are among a number of apps vying to capture TikTok Shop’s lucrative market. For a few hours on Sunday, when TikTok shut down to comply with a US ban, it looked like their moment had come. The platform is up and running again, and President Donald Trump has vowed to save it, though that would likely require owner ByteDance to sell TikTok, or for Congress to overturn the ban.
But even if the app once again disappears, it’s not clear whether any of its rivals are in a position to provide the seamless, algorithm-driven shopping experience that drew so many to TikTok Shop.
“The uniqueness [of TikTok] is the algorithm and the consumer behaviour,” said Nadya Okamoto, co-founder of August, a period care brand that launched on TikTok Shop in October 2024.
TikTok’s success with e-commerce has been inextricably linked to its creator-driven ecosystem. Brands could easily engage a wide network of influencers, thanks to TikTok’s backend automations that streamlined the process of seeding products at scale, said Kevin Gould, co-founder of nail care brand Glamnetic.
“Switching our influencer strategy to YouTube and Instagram would require a more manual process and we wouldn’t have as big of a reach,” he added.
That isn’t stopping those platforms, and others, from giving e-commerce their best shot. Whether they succeed will hinge on how effectively they can mimic, or even improve upon, what’s worked at TikTok Shop.
Instagram Checkout
The Meta-owned app was one of the first movers in the social commerce space when it launched Instagram Checkout in 2019, allowing brands to integrate their catalogues of products with their feeds. Instagram offered brands a polished user interface that would lend a premium appeal to their products, a positioning that had eluded TikTok Shop.
Instagram also competes with TikTok in terms of the size of its user base, with more than 160 million Americans active on the platform, making it a natural alternative for brands looking to transition, as many users are already engaged there.
In the years since launch, however, brands across fashion and beauty have found the platform’s foray into e-commerce too clunky to be useful.
“Instagram [Checkout] for us has never seen enough success for me to even regularly look at the dashboard,” said Okamoto. “But I always have the Tiktok Seller Central open and I refresh it probably 10 times a day.”
Other brands, including Gray Matters, have also complained about Instagram Checkout’s limited ability to add product descriptions, thus complicating the customer journey, as consumers only used Instagram Checkout as a way to check an item’s price before heading to a brand’s main site.
For Okamoto, the platform’s algorithm doesn’t allow for product discovery, thus making it tough for smaller brands with tighter advertising budgets to stand out.
“Tiktok has this unique ability to sort of amplify everyone and anyone. Anything can be a trend,” Okamoto added. “Instagram is where you’re catching up with people that you’ve followed since high school.”
YouTube Shopping
YouTube, as a video-first platform, at first glance seems poised to capture TikTok’s user base and the TikTok Shop business. YouTube Shorts, a short-form video feed, mimics TikTok’s stream of videos, and is designed to keep the user engaged for longer.
Okamoto and the August team are considering moving their social commerce operations to YouTube Shopping, an e-commerce integration that launched in 2021.
Similar to TikTok, YouTube Shopping allows brands to tag their products in their own content or content of creators they work with. The platform is powered by Shopify and requires brands and creators to have at least 1,000 subscribers with 4,000 watch hours for long-form videos in the last year or 1 million watch hours on YouTube Shorts in the last 90 days.
Brands without already established audiences on the platform and without a strong feed of content may find the move to YouTube from TikTok more challenging.
WhatNot
A number of livestream shopping start-ups have come to market recently, hoping to capitalise off of the phenomenon that was popularised in China, but WhatNot, with its recent $265 million funding round that valued the company at $5 billion, leads the pack.
Livestreams on the platform have a “sudden death” feature, allowing users to bid on items in a short space of time, creating engagement and urgency. Like TikTok, WhatNot offers sellers the ability to host flash sales and launched, in 2023, a rewards system, allowing shoppers to redeem rewards after a set number of purchases.
The app, which launched in 2019, was initially aimed at collectors but has since expanded to accessories, beauty and women’s apparel.
“They’ve just been the perennial sleeper because they really hit it off with these intense collector type people,” said Maloof. “They’re just not in the mainstream as much.”
The challenge, however, is that while WhatNot’s proposition is appealing, brands would need to persuade their customers to join the app, as it doesn’t yet have as established a user base as TikTok, which could prove difficult.
SnapChat
Since 2022, Snapchat has rolled out key shopping features designed to lure brands to the platform.
The social media app allows brands to use its augmented reality feature to transform products in their catalogues into virtual fashion that users can “try on” before purchasing. The platform has also established itself as a site for entertainment through short-form video and its Spotlight Feature, which bears close resemblance to the For You page.
Last week, the company launched a campaign to lure TikTok users to its platform with the tagline “find your favourites on SnapChat.” The campaign could boost the app’s user base in the US, which has remained stagnant at 100 million, for the last eight quarters.
Snapchat’s Spotlight feature, hasn’t, however, been successful enough to help the platform shed its perception of being a communication-first platform for Gen-Z with its well-known disappearing messages as opposed to an entertainment-first platform.
Pinterest, which has a global user base of over 500 million people, has also made its foray into social commerce in recent years.
The app is hoping to lure Gen-Z with its shopping features, such as “product pins” which direct users to brands’ e-commerce sites. The social platform, according to Michael Maloof, vice president at Earnest Analytics, comes closest to TikTok in its algorithm-driven recommendations, allowing for brand discoverability.
“Users on Pinterest come in with projects. They’re often putting together a look which leads to spending on multiple items,” said Maloof. “You’re interacting with it a little bit more than some of the other platforms and it’s in turn using your data to find things you might be interested in.”
The challenge for brands, however, would be to train their customers to expect to shop on the platform and not just curate images for vision boards. Without the platform having a built-in shopping channel, customers are unlikely to hit the purchase button as impulsively as they would have on TikTok Shop.
“People really like the combination of discovery and purchase” on TikTok, Maloof said. “It’s scratching the itch that the old department stores did, where you’d have this amazing experience and then walk out with great products.”
