TikTok Shop is now the fourth-largest US beauty retailer, passing Target and Costco at $4.4bn

In just three years, TikTok Shop has taken $4.4bn in US beauty sales and overtaken legacy retailers, growing 107% year-on-year while Amazon beauty grew 24%. For brands still treating it as an awareness channel, the market has already moved: beauty ecommerce in America now runs on affiliate creators, not shelves.

TikTok Shop is now the fourth-largest health and beauty ecommerce retailer in the US, with sales surpassing $4.4 billion and category dollar sales jumping 107.7% year-on-year in the 52 weeks ended December 27, 2025, according to data published by eMarketer on 15 July. While TikTok's 1.8% share of beauty and personal care remains small against Amazon's 23%, the social commerce marketplace is growing far faster, with Amazon's dollar sales increasing 23.9% and unit sales 25.2% in the same period.

The milestone puts TikTok Shop ahead of Target and Costco in the beauty ecommerce race, despite both retailers expanding online. Target's first-party online sales increased 8.9% year-over-year in fiscal Q1 2026, its highest ecommerce growth rate since Q3 2024, while Costco ecommerce sales grew at least 20% in its fiscal Q3 2026 for the third consecutive quarter. TikTok Shop beat them both, and did it without a physical shelf in the country.

The affiliate creator engine

The velocity is creator-driven. Creator affiliate now drives the dominant share of TikTok Shop gross merchandise value in every major beauty category, with native conversion at 5 to 8% versus Instagram's roughly 2%, mechanically outperforming paid social for affordable beauty products.

About 10% of households in the United States have now purchased products through the platform, spending an average of $118 annually and shopping three to four times every year, according to NielsenIQ. That household penetration is building repeat behaviour, not just one-off viral spikes.

The economics are brutal for brands used to traditional retail. The average US commission rate is 13.02%, with beauty and supplements at the high end (15 to 30%) while electronics tend to be lower (5 to 15%). Creator payouts that previously reached around 20% are now being repriced closer to 10 to 15% in affected categories after TikTok Shop reportedly cut affiliate commission caps in June 2026, putting margin pressure on brands that built growth on aggressive creator incentives.

A $25 blush generating 6% conversion through affiliate at 18% commission costs the brand $0.27 per customer acquired via affiliate, versus $8 to $15 customer acquisition cost via Instagram ads for the same product. US direct-to-consumer beauty brands that built affiliate programmes in 2024 are reporting customer acquisition cost three to five times lower than paid social for comparable products, according to Glossy and Beauty Independent.

The scale required has escalated. A 100-creator-per-quarter seeding program is "no longer visible in category feeds" at that density, and brands seeding fewer than 500 creators per quarter are "structurally underscaled for 2026 beauty competition", according to a playbook published by 5W Public Relations drawing on data from Pattern, BeautyMatter, eMarketer and Euromonitor. Brands operating at the 1,000-plus creator threshold include Rhode, Merit and CeraVe, with CeraVe recording 55.5% TikTok Shop GMV growth year-to-date, and creator seeding typically generating approximately three times return on investment within 90 days.

Who wins, who's getting left behind

The majority of the top 10 best-selling beauty brands on TikTok Shop are newcomers, with K-beauty favourites Medicube and Dr Melaxin beating out more familiar names like Tarte and Color Wow by a healthy margin, with Medicube selling 6.2 million units since launching on TikTok Shop, compared with just 213,000 for Rhode, which has roughly four times the number of followers, according to data from TikTok analytics firm Kalodata shared with Business of Fashion.

The marketplace serves as an important incubator for emerging brands, which are using their newfound influence to challenge big names like Estée Lauder and L'Oréal. Beauty retailers like Ulta and Sally Beauty are establishing a presence on the platform, with Ulta Beauty becoming the first beauty and wellness retailer to launch an official TikTok Shop storefront in March.

The brand playbook has shifted to performance over awareness. South Korean makeup and skincare brand Missha follows what the brand refers to as "a bottom-up diffusion" approach with creators that targets micro and mid-tier creators and affiliates, being flexible and adjusting strategies quickly in response to TikTok's fast-moving algorithm, says Hyun-Kyoung Park, US and UK marketing team lead at Missha. Laneige operates at even larger scale, maintaining a network of roughly 200,000 affiliates.

Peter Thomas Roth adapted its TikTok Shop strategy based on learnings from early viral hits, enlarging its creator network from just four in 2023 to a couple of hundred today, registering $100,000 in sales on its fourth day on TikTok Shop.

What it means for the rest of the industry

Category buyers at Sephora, Ulta and Credo have restructured how they evaluate brands for shelf placement, reviewing TikTok Shop GMV trends, hashtag volume, dermfluencer endorsement logs, Amazon review counts and creator-to-purchase conversion data before trade meetings, the 5W playbook states, recommending brands prepare a monthly one-page velocity report covering those metrics for each retail partner.

TikTok Shop's influence on Amazon search rankings means virality on one platform now directly monetises on another. COSRX, the leading cultural beauty brand from Korea and known for its Snail Mucin Serum that's trended across social platforms, channelled 72% of its ecommerce sales via Amazon in 2024, per Euromonitor data.

For the second year in a row, TikTok Shop will be the fastest-growing retailer eMarketer tracks, expected to generate $23.41 billion in sales this year, giving it a larger ecommerce business than Target, Kroger, Shein and Best Buy.

With growth accelerating, market research firm Circana projects TikTok Shop could account for as much as 10% of total retail market share in the US by 2028.

For brands that haven't moved, the window is narrowing. Succeeding on the platform requires constant experimentation and speed, with performance increasingly depending on the strength of a brand's affiliate network, and forcing creators to adhere strictly to brand guidelines risking bottlenecks and inhibiting authenticity, warns eMarketer.

The tier-one beauty retail channel in America no longer needs a door.