TikTok, and in particular TikTok Shop, had a banner year in 2024. According to a Dash Hudson and NielsenIQ report, TikTok Shop became the ninth-largest online beauty and wellness retailer in the U.S. in 2024. But the app got off to a tumultuous start in 2025. On January 18, it went dark in the U.S. following a Supreme Court ruling that its Chinese ownership represented a threat to U.S. security. Less than 24 hours later, the app was back up. Following his inauguration, President Trump extended the deadline for TikTok to find new ownership to April 4.
But for creators and brands that have made TikTok and TikTok Shop a key part of their revenue, that temporary blackout was all it took to spark a wave of panic about what might happen if the U.S. loses access to the app altogether.
“When we’re in these moments of uncertainty, there’s a lot of fearmongering, there’s a lot of misinformation, and people are really desperate for a single source of truth,” said Leslie Ann Hall, CEO and founder of e-commerce agency Iced Media.
But Hall said her team is advising clients, which includes the likes of Glow Recipe and Dieux, to remain steady: “We really are business as usual on TikTok.”
In the short-term, staying on TikTok has proven successful in spite of the temporary shutdown. According to software solutions company SOTI, TikTok Shop sales spiked during the week of January 18, seeing a nearly $5 million week-over-week increase when compared to January 12-19, 2024. Hall, as well, said her clients who were back on TikTok after the blackout saw increases in revenue and low costs-per-acquisition of new customers.
“The brands that are either reallocating or maybe leaving the platform preemptively are creating huge opportunity for those brands that are sticking around,” said Hall. “In the week following the ban, our clients that reopened their shops and restarted their campaigns within 24-48 hours were the biggest winners.”
But staying bullish on TikTok doesn’t mean not taking any action. The app’s uncertainty highlights the importance of agility in adopting new shopping platforms as consumer behavior evolves.
The social shopping app Whatnot saw its three best sales days ever the weekend of the TikTok ban. In January, website builder Wix announced a partnership with YouTube Shopping to allow merchants to sell their products directly on the video social media platform. Video-driven shopping app Flip saw a surge of users in the wake of the TikTok ban and debuted a fund to offer equity to creators.
“As a new [shopping] method comes out, you should be able to adapt very quickly as a retailer to any way that [consumers] want to place an order,” said Shash Anand, svp of product strategy at SOTI.
SOTI’s 2025 retail report found that when shopping online, consumers value two key, and sometimes competing, values: efficiency and security. Its report found that 61% of U.S. consumers have abandoned online purchases because they didn’t trust the site with their payment details. Globally, 64% of consumers said they prefer personalized recommendations from retailers based on past purchases, compared to 30% in 2024. For Gen Z and millennial shoppers, Anand said, shopping on TikTok is appealing because its algorithm is attuned to fast-changing trends. But not all users are confident that shopping on social media is secure; SOTI’s report found 70% of U.S. consumers worry about data security when shopping on social media platforms.
“While social commerce is fueling growth, there’s this dilemma. Consumers want a very personalized shopping experience. They want the retailer to know exactly their past purchases,” said Anand. “At the same time, they want to make sure that the site that they’re on is not going to expose their personalized data.”
Social shopping is still an emerging category in the U.S. compared to countries like China. According to Hall, live shopping drives roughly 80% of revenue for Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, compared to 15% on TikTok. But Hall encourages her clients to investigate affiliate programs and selling opportunities on platforms like Flip and YouTube, even if their interfaces are not yet as sophisticated as those of TikTok. And for those competing social platforms, now is the time to strike, when it comes to social shopping.
“TikTok Shop really accelerated social shopping in the U.S. beyond what anyone could imagine,” she said. “It really is to the benefit of these other platforms to have a solution at the intersection of how people are natively using those platforms, and then a turnkey solution to make it easier to shop than it is today.”