How TikTok Shop is driving holiday sales for these fashion and beauty brands

TikTok is growing into a pivotal e-commerce destination for some fashion and beauty brands experimenting with its recently launched Shop platform during the holidays. Tarte Cosmetics, PacSun and Gen Z-oriented fashion brand Cider are among the brands that over the past two months have witnessed a sharp boost in their number of sales originating from TikTok Shop, the social media juggernaut’s in-app shopping platform that rolled out in September. And that rapid growth has only been accelerated by holiday shopping events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, helped along by steep discounts of up to 50% for TikTok Shop consumers that are fully subsidized by TikTok. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Tarte even saw several of its products sell out entirely on TikTok Shop after the platform started offering its Black Friday discounts on Nov. 14, a brand spokesperson said. The brand sold out of its “Best of Maracuja Juicy Lips” set, for example, the same day that the Black Friday promotion began—and according to Tarte’s TikTok Shop page, the brand has sold nearly 44,000 of those lip sets through the platform. Also read: TikTok Shop launches for all U.S. users In total, TikTok users have made more than 300,000 total purchases from Tarte through TikTok Shop—but the platform’s impact also expands beyond TikTok, said Samantha Kitain, chief marketing officer at Tarte. “TikTok Shop itself is supporting our DTC sales, but it’s also creating all of this content that goes with it,” she said, referring to videos shared by creators through TikTok Shop’s affiliate marketing program that contain a link directly to a product available on Tarte’s TikTok Shop storefront. “You don’t get that from any other retail platform.” @nikidetrich Run before the sale ends- this is the cheapest I’ve seen it! 💜 #tarte #tartemaracujajuicylip #tiktokshop ♬ original sound - NIKI | FASHION INSPO In October alone, TikTok Shop drove a 40% increase in Tarte’s overall direct-to-consumer sales, Kitain said. That surge resulted from a combination of affiliate creator videos, video shopping ads and shopping livestreams held five times per week, she said. Tarte’s success on TikTok Shop is also crossing over into brick-and-mortar purchases, she said. “All of this content is creating brand awareness, so even if checking out in-app isn’t necessarily your shopping behavior, you’re still consuming the content and remembering it for later when you walk into a Sephora or an Ulta or going to our website. That’s what’s probably most interesting to us about [TikTok Shop]—yes, we’re driving direct sales, but we’re also building brand awareness at the same time, and right now we don’t really have another marketing channel that does those things.” Cider, too, has seen a significant jump in TikTok Shop sales between October and November. The brand can trace the majority of those transactions back to a handful of viral videos created by TikTok Shop affiliate creators, including one from creator @makaela.renee which has amassed more than 10 million views and nearly 1 million likes since it was posted on Nov. 17. @makaela.renee This sweater dress is almost … too cute. Literally fits like a glove 🤍#thanksgiving #cider #sweaterdress @Cider #CapCut ♬ original sound - $ TikTok users have collectively viewed the product featured in her video—Cider’s two-piece knit dress—over 80 million times, said Yu Oppel, the brand’s co-founder and CMO. Cider has sold over 34,000 units of the dress through TikTok Shop, accounting for just under a third of the brand’s roughly 100,000 overall TikTok Shop sales. The brand has sold more than 4,000 units of that dress alone on a peak day, Oppel added. Through the TikTok Shop affiliate program, Cider’s products are “featured organically through all of these different, diverse pockets of influencers” without needing to pay those creators directly, she said. Instead, creators earn a cut of any sales made through the link included in their video in a small box at the bottom of the screen. “With influencer marketing in general, attribution is always a pain point,” Oppel said. “But with TikTok Shop, you can close the loop within the app, and that affiliate mechanism makes it so much more straightforward to see that attribution. I think a lot more influencers are going to buy into this new way of collaborating with brands, too, because they're already posting on TikTok anyway. It's just as easy as linking [a product].” Check out the latest influencer marketing trends TikTok Shop affiliates have also played a crucial role in driving sales for PacSun, said Tyler MacDonald, its associate director of brand. PacSun initially gained access to TikTok Shop in February through the platform’s beta program. But it wasn’t until October, when PacSun began leaning heavily into the affiliate program, that the brand started seeing a sizable increase in TikTok Shop transactions, he said. Brands have two options through the affiliate program, said Nicole Rechtszaid, co-founder of Ghost Agency, a social commerce agency and one of the first TikTok Shop partners in the U.S. They can either launch an “open plan,” where the brand sets a universal commission rate and any TikTok Shop affiliate can include a commissionable link to that brand’s products in their videos; or the brand can reach out to specific creators and set individual commission rates for each. TikTok’s algorithm is “favoring” these affiliate videos in an attempt to boost awareness around TikTok Shop and “make people understand this is now a platform you can use to shop,” Rechtszaid said. The algorithmic boost effectively provides brands using its affiliate program with a free bump in brand awareness. “Every brand that is impulse-buy-oriented and DTC should have a TikTok Shop strategy right now, and you should be pushing that style of content, for sure,” said Keith Bendes, VP of strategy and marketing at influencer marketing platform Linqia. “TikTok Shop content, from an algorithm standpoint, is obviously being prioritized. If you actually want your content being seen right now on TikTok, you need to make sure you have content out there that's shoppable, just to increase its chance of being delivered to eyeballs.” Not all TikTok users are happy with this change, though, with users such as @gracejohanna calling the frequency of these affiliate videos in their For You pages “dystopian.” @gracejohanna #fyp ♬ original sound - gracejohanna PacSun has embraced the “open plan” model, MacDonald said, effectively opening about 90% of the brand’s total product catalog to affiliate creators, who can purchase a given item through TikTok Shop and create content discussing, reviewing or simply featuring it. “Within the last month, the open plan has definitely been a key sales driver,” he said. “We’re really able to hit new audiences with it through these creators. And most recently, we’ve actually seen the success of open plan with a pair of our low-rise baggy jeans that have essentially gone viral across the entire platform. We've been selling thousands of units of them." For PacSun, though, many of those transactions aren’t taking place directly on TikTok Shop. The brand has only driven about 10,000 sales on the platform, according to its TikTok Shop page, compared to Tarte’s more than 300,000 TikTok Shop transactions and Cider's 100,000-plus. @ameliagoodsell i am now in love with low rise!!! #pacsunjeans #lowrisejeans ♬ original sound - amelia🌷 But between October and November, PacSun’s gross merchandise value, or its total value of sales within a given period, soared 580%, due in large part to the sales boost the brand has seen from TikTok Shop, MacDonald said. And as PacSun has headed into the holiday season, it’s prioritized regularly updating its TikTok Shop catalog with new products—primarily to ensure affiliate creators are able to post about them, he said. The brand is also pushing “key buys” around the holidays, including stocking stuffers and accessories, to the top of its TikTok Shop storefront alongside viral products such as its low-rise jeans, he said. Additionally, like Tarte, PacSun has also been regularly hosting liveshopping streams on TikTok in an effort to drive TikTok Shop purchases. The brand is currently hosting one to two livestreams each week for up to two hours at a time, and has been doing so since it joined the TikTok Shop beta program back in February, MacDonald said. In recent weeks, PacSun has oriented those liveshopping streams toward holiday shopping priorities such as gift guides, he said. “I will say we've seen more success with short-form videos from creators versus our livestreams,” MacDonald said. “We are seeing purchases [in our livestreams], for sure—not as many as we’re seeing from short-form videos, but our views and click-throughs of products in the livestreams have been increasing month-over-month. But we're excited about the future of live[shopping], and it's definitely going to be a key component throughout the holiday and next year.”

How TikTok Shop is driving holiday sales for these fashion and beauty brands

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