TikTok Shop Now Outsells Target and Home Depot Online in the US

TikTok built its business on 15-second videos. Now it's beating Target at online shopping.

US credit and debit card transaction data compiled by Consumer Edge, a customer-intelligence firm, shows TikTok Shop accounted for roughly 2% of US online retail spending in July, according to Business Insider. That's up from about 1.2% a year earlier. This put TikTok Shop ahead of online spending at Target, Costco and Home Depot last month.

"Massive" is how Michael Gunther, Consumer Edge's SVP of Research & Market Intelligence, described the jump. "Given that TikTok Shop was at zero a few years ago, these moves are really, really big," he told Business Insider. "I don't know if I've seen something like this."

Some of that year-over-year pop is a scheduling quirk. Amazon's Prime Day landed in July 2025 but not July 2026, meaning TikTok didn't have to compete with Amazon's biggest promotional event this time around. Gunther said that effect doesn't appear to be doing much heavy lifting, though. TikTok's market-share growth has been steady and roughly linear since launch, not a spike tied to one calendar fluke.

The numbers behind the headline

Zoom out and the growth is even starker. Global TikTok Shop spending hit $50.3 billion in the first half of 2026, a 92% jump from the same period last year, according to a report from Tabcut and Momentum Works covered by Mashable. The US and Southeast Asia are the two biggest markets. US spending alone hit $11.8 billion in that period, roughly double what it was a year earlier.

Tabcut and Momentum Works project global gross merchandise value will top $100 billion for the first time this year and reach $123.5 billion by the end of 2026.

Separate industry analysis cited by Digital Weekday and distributed via EINPresswire pegs 2025 US TikTok Shop sales at approximately $15.8 billion, more than double the prior year, with projections that US sales could clear $20 billion in 2026. That same analysis says the US has pulled ahead of the UK, an earlier and initially more cautious TikTok Shop market that still has more than 200,000 active sellers but has grown more gradually.

Paige Evans, a former Operations Manager at UK TikTok Shop partner agency Outlandish, told the outlet that British brands moved too fast into hard-selling before audiences trusted the platform. American brands, by contrast, leaned on creator-led storytelling that felt native to the app rather than traditional ads, according to the analysis.

Still small next to Amazon and Walmart

None of this makes TikTok a threat to Amazon anytime soon. Amazon holds around 35% of US online retail market share depending on the month, according to Consumer Edge's data cited by Business Insider. Walmart sits around 7%, still more than triple TikTok Shop's share.

But TikTok has spent heavily to get where it is. The company built out its own shipping and logistics network, onboarded hundreds of thousands of sellers, launched an Amazon Prime-style membership with free shipping, and started offering managed video and advertising services to brands, per Business Insider. It pulled in more than $500 million in US sales during Black Friday Cyber Monday week last year and has onboarded brands including Samsung, Disney and Ralph Lauren.

Modern Retail's reporting shows the platform is also moving beyond impulse buys. Mellow Sleep, a direct-to-consumer sleep brand, launched on TikTok Shop in fall 2025 and has since racked up more than 50,000 reviews and 20,000 five-star ratings for products like an $85 comforter and a $50 pillow. Founder Chad Keller said bigger names joining the platform, like Pacsun and Skims, added credibility. One of his creators went from generating $80,000 a month in sales to $1.5 million a month over ten months, he said.

Keller also flagged real friction points. TikTok's two-business-day dispatch requirement for domestic orders doesn't always work for smaller brands shipping bulky items, forcing some sellers to split fulfillment between their own warehouses and TikTok's still-developing Fulfilled by TikTok program. He'd also like to see TikTok Shop's fee structure simplified.

Gen Z dissatisfaction

Growth in dollars doesn't mean universal enthusiasm. A Harris Poll from May 2026, published by EMARKETER and cited by Mashable, found 63% of Gen Z respondents said they'd stopped buying from TikTok Shop. EMARKETER suggested that could reflect growing dissatisfaction with the marketplace itself. Even so, 62% of respondents said they still use TikTok to discover new products, and shoppers aged 25 to 44 remain the platform's most active buyers, per Mashable.

Part of that dissatisfaction may be earned. Mashable reported in November 2025 that TikTok Shop had been flooded with an estimated 70 million questionable product listings, partly generated with AI tools, and reported this year that a gray market for GLP-1 weight-loss drugs has been growing on the platform. Neither TikTok nor Consumer Edge has published data quantifying how much that specific problem is affecting sales or trust.

Business Insider's Consumer Edge data also shows the platform's growth is concentrated. Shoppers who made 20 or more purchases in the second quarter drove about 30% of all TikTok Shop spending while making up just 5% of buyers. The fastest-growing demographic by spending growth wasn't teenagers. It was shoppers over 35.

Whether TikTok Shop keeps closing the gap with Target and Costco, or whether the Gen Z pullback and the fake-product problem catch up with it first, will show up in whether Consumer Edge's next few monthly market-share snapshots keep climbing or start to flatten.