Thursday this week, TikTok held their “Discover TikTok Shop” in London, discussing TikTok’s revolutionary approach to discovery-based shopping. Jan Wilk, Head of TikTok Shop UK, reports back on the event and what you missed, as well as a major announcement of TikTok Shop expansion in Europe!
Since 2021, TikTok has been on a mission to bring joy and inspiration back to the shopping experience, and create a real opportunity for businesses, large and small, to reimagine how they create and sell great products on TikTok Shop.
According to Neilson IQ, TikTok Shop was the fastest growing online retailer in 2024, which is testament to the astonishing growth we’ve experienced in the last 18 months.
In the UK, our business is growing rapidly, with a 131% annual increase in the number of shoppers on TikTok Shop, and a 180% year-on-year rise in revenue at the end of last year. Over 6,000 TikTok Shop Lives are hosted in the UK every single day.
With such strong growth in the UK market, we’ve made the decision to bring our platform to even more customers throughout Europe.
We’re incredibly excited to announce that, on 31st of March, we’ll be expanding TikTok Shop into France, Italy and Germany, which follows our expansion into Ireland and Spain last December. TikTok users in these markets will be able to shop from their favourite brands, sellers and creators directly from within the TikTok app.
We’re often asked what we think the biggest driver of this growth is. And for us, it’s something we call discovery ecommerce.
This week, we hosted an exclusive event in London which brought together journalists, small businesses and big brands, to demonstrate how TikTok is bringing joy back to the shopping experience.
What makes shopping on TikTok Shop different?
On TikTok Shop, people engage directly with sellers and creators through shoppable videos and interactive live streams to discover and instantly buy the latest trending products without leaving the app.
Shoppable videos and LIVE shopping reignite personal connections and real-time interactions once core to traditional shopping, making it easy for sellers to engage with thousands or even millions of customers at any one time, giving consumers the opportunity to discover new brands and products for the very first time.
Discovery ecommerce is about finding items you love, in the same way you would in a shop. When you scroll through your For You Page, it’s like your very own personalised shopping aisle – you will find products you’re interested in, with experts telling you everything you need to know about them.
TikTok Shop is product-led, it’s immersive, interactive and community-powered. And we believe there is no other platform out there like it.
Allowing big brands and small businesses to reach new customers
As part of the event, we were joined by Jack Timpany, UK Ecommerce Activation Director at L’Oreal, Lucy Murray, Brand Director at Free Soul, James Edmunds, Managing Director of Trip, and Ben Gallagher, Luxe Collective Co-founder and CEO, for a panel discussion on how TikTok Shop and discovery ecommerce is fueling the growth of their businesses and helping them reach new audiences.
Some of our favourite takeaways from the panel included:
We’ve always been great at building a community online. But we found it tough converting them to customers. We almost felt like focusing on awareness was becoming a waste of time.
TikTok Shop came at such a good time for us, it allowed us to convert our community into customers. After the first three months of launching, it was responsible for 26% of our revenue.
TikTok Shop Live gives us instant customer service. It instills trust. You can ask questions, get an immediate response, see the condition of our pre-loved products and engage with your customers.
– Ben Gallagher, Luxe Collective
What we’ve always found is, the way that people enter our brand world is through word-of-mouth recommendation. It’s traditionally happened separately from the point of purchase. People aren’t chatting to each other in supermarkets.
TikTok Shop Live allows our customers to interact with each other, get recommendations from each other, talk about our products, all through the platform.
– James Edmunds, Trip
TikTok Shop democratises the UK marketplace. Beauty is fun, it sparks joy, it’s deeply personal. Traditional online marketing channels like search, they’re not imaginative.
We’ve been crying out for a platform like TikTok Shop which allows us to connect with customers and put a face to our brand. TikTok Shop is a perfect platform for beauty, it’s going to deliver incremental growth for the beauty industry.
– Jack Timpany, L’Oreal
Community is such a buzzword, but our whole business is about supporting women’s health. We’re a direct-to-consumer brand and as much as we’d love to host thousands of events, it’s unrealistic.
TikTok Shop almost supersedes events. It allows us to reach people we can’t meet in real life and engage with them directly. Every day on TikTok Shop is an event for your brand.
– Lucy Murray, Free Soul
A bustling marketplace for businesses of all sizes
We were also lucky enough to bring together 16 of our sellers and a number of UK and European media titles, allowing journalists to discover different businesses on TikTok Shop and talk through some of their unique products.
From TikTok Shop success stories like beauty brand Made By Mitchell, which was the first business to make £1 million on a single LIVE stream and is now stocked in a number of UK retailers, through to brands like Hair Syrup, part of the next generation of TikTok Shop success stories who recently found fame on the BBC’s Dragons Den, these brands demonstrate the fact that TikTok Shop is a place for both big brands and small businesses.
We also hosted a TikTok Shop LIVE with Nature Spell – the UK’s #1 bestselling rosemary oil – throughout the event. TikTok Shop LIVE is almost like a personal storefront for businesses, but instead of speaking to one, or a handful, of customers at one time, they can interact with hundreds. Giving guests an authentic behind-the-scenes experience was an amazing way to show them what we see as the future of shopping.
Looking ahead: 2025 and beyond
I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved so far, bringing that discovery and joy back to shopping – but I’m even more excited about what’s to come.
We have over 200,000 active sellers on the platform, the majority of which are SMBs. That’s double the amount from this time last year, along with major household brand names like L’Oreal, Zalando, ASOS & most recently Lidl.
I’m hopeful and energized by the road ahead, and open opening TikTok Shop for business in three additional European markets next week will mean we can discover more customers throughout Europe. I’m looking forward to welcoming even more creators, small businesses, and brands onto TikTok Shop to join us in this next exciting phase of discovery ecommerce.
