How big is TikTok Shop? Just two years after its U.S. launch, its sales already rival those of a 30-year-old ecommerce platform.
So claims analytics firm EchoTik, which compared TikTok Shop’s gross merchandise value (GMV) to that of eBay. When the two social shopping hubs are paired against one another, eBay still comes out on top — but only barely. The place to go to bid on used items generated $20.1 billion of quarterly sales between July and September of this year. TikTok Shop’s GMV over the same period reached $19 billion.
Almost-kinda-sorta equalling eBay may seem like an inconsequential achievement on the surface, but the astonishing part of this comparison isn’t the relative sales figures — it’s the rapid pace at which TikTok Shop has evolved into a multi-billion-dollar social shopping empire. eBay had a multi-decade head start before its ByteDance-owned rival even existed, and the publicly traded company established its ecommerce presence long before anyone conceived of the term “creator economy.”
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Thanks to a strong consumer base in Asia, an aggressive overseas expansion plan, and some regulatory victories in the United States, TikTok Shop has rapidly gained on eBay in the arena of sales. In 2024, Shop’s GMV for the entire year topped out at $33.2 billion, and that figure was itself a massive increase over the previous year.
Even though the threat of a federal ban has loomed over TikTok’s U.S. operations for all of 2025, Americans still provided the biggest chunk of TikTok Shop’s quarterly sales. U.S. consumers accounted for between $4 billion and $4.5 billion in quarterly sales, a number that more than doubled year-over-year. “We have mostly focused on TikTok from this point of view of the TikTok ban, and we have almost forgotten that TikTok Shop’s share in US ecommerce just continues to grow slowly,” independent ecommerce analyst Juozas Kaziukėnas told WIRED.
The most astonishing part of this comapirson is that TikTok Shop might only be getting started. The platform’s significant sales figures in the U.S. have come even as many Americans remain skeptical about social shopping. If the app can convince more of its users to buy into its virtual storefronts, surpassing eBay may only be the beginning. I’m not much of a bidder — hence my lack of experience with eBay — but if I was, I’d bet on TikTok’s continued ecommerce success.
