Yahoo Finance Is TikTok Shop Too Good to Be True?
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I got the deal of a lifetime the other day. Never in my life did I think I’d own a bottle of Maison Francis Kurkdjian Paris Baccarat Rouge 540. But then the preship email confirmation came in, and here I am, practically owning it.
One 2.4 oz. bottle of the eau de parfum retails for $325. It can typically be found in the vanities and personal auras of those wealthy enough to afford such an indulgence, e.g. Olivia Rodrigo and Kacey Musgraves. It smells like diamonds soaked in amber, jasmine, and fat.
But I didn’t get the eau de parfum. I got the extrait de parfum, which smells like diamonds that have been brined in the eau de parfum for 100 years. According to the brand, this concentrated version “intensifies” the EDP. At la Maison, it costs $465. On TikTok Shop, I got it for $54 and change. All I had to do was turn a blind eye to the store it came from, which is called Restaurant Fried Chicken Group LLC.
Have you been to the TikTok Shop? Affiliate links—unique URLs that allow e-tailers to track path-to-purchase and distribute commissions based on total sales—have long studded the profiles of influencers big and small on the short-video platform, but last year brought the slow yet seismic rollout of TikTok’s all-in-one social shopping complex.
The Shop officially launched in September, though some TikTok users were granted access to its features for longer, including a shop button that appears beneath a video and links within the app to a simple checkout interface. So far it has been wildly successful at vending beauty and personal-care products with delirious speed; after one month in official business, this category comprised 85% of all of TikTok Shop’s sales.
The different warrens of the Shop are based on ancient mercurial tactics all deployed in harmony, like a shopping orchestra. The For You page, like YouTube, sets out to genuinely entertain, and it often does, until you find yourself knee deep in a pool of affiliate links. The Live sections are like QVC, featuring an endless scroll of living, breathing sellers engaged in living, breathing, and selling. The TikTok Shop page itself looks more like Wish or Temu, its sparse design advertising only a product’s name, price, discount, and, in some cases, how many have sold. One afternoon I came across a detangling hairbrush that had sold almost 100,000 units, for gross sales of over $1.5 million.
“Sellers,” the app’s official parlance for vendors like Revolve and Tarte Cosmetics, can benefit from the level playing field, where anything can plume up in a viral moment at any time. TikTok’s notorious algorithm works like an engine, or an arcade claw that plucks seemingly random moments of high engagement and thrusts them into the public marketplace. But the Shop is also attractive to “creators,” who function as salespeople.
Unlike Instagram, where many rely on third-party affiliate link services (you may have heard of LTK, formerly known as LIKEtoKNOW.it), TikTok has a built-in affiliate program that rewards the seller, creator, and, of course, itself with every transaction. The company makes a small percentage on each sale, and it is slowly increasing that percentage to 6% for most categories beginning in April, and then to 8% across all categories in July.
“TikTok just makes it so much easier,” says Kelsey Martinez, a TikTok video creator with the username @itsmekelsc. “You can watch someone putting on the beauty product literally right in front of you. You click one button, and it's the end. It's yours.”
Martinez received an early invitation to the Shop and began posting shoppable videos in June. Her first video was for a fragrance mist from Sol de Janeiro, which she thought smelled like summer. “That took off,” she recalls, declining to share the metrics of her success. A Day in the Life or Get Ready With Me video of Martinez’s might get tens or hundreds of thousands of views, but when she reviews single products (and links to them in the Shop), they often cross the million-view threshold. It was the arrival of the TikTok Shop that allowed Martinez to quit her job as a human resources professional to focus on TikTok full-time.
But the growing popularity of TikTok Shop in the US also seems like a growing adoption of Chinese eCommerce, concentrated in mobile apps and trending toward live selling. Americans are warming up to the idea, and the beauty and personal care category is providing the perfect dry kindling. It’s not a matter of whether or not TikTok Shop will catch on—the company is investing heavily in making that a high statistical likelihood, if not inevitable—but when you will start using it too.
The majority of shoppers will come to the Shop only briefly in their purchase journey. A Live or FYP video that is tagged “earns commission” will also contain a link that pulls the user directly to a checkout page; after the sale they get deposited back into their regularly scheduled programming.
But none of these links were finding me, so I had to seek them out. I went to the Shop grid and searched for “heavy moisturizer,” at which point I was offered the first TikTok Shop discount of my life: on a tube of Embryolisse’s Lait-Crème moisturizer. On Violet Grey, it’s $29; I got it for around $11.
The Shop’s discounts work in interesting ways. Some of them are subsidized directly by TikTok, rather than the retailers. In other words, if you find a deal, TikTok probably paid to give it to you.
In this way, the money spent looks like a marketing expense; a small price to pay to make shopping irresistible. As I scrolled through the Shop’s offerings, I came across a rich moisturizer in packaging that looked rather similar to CeraVe’s (though the retailer was listed as Young Vision Beauty and the brand as Ibcccndc) and was on sale for $3—I couldn’t afford not to buy it.
A week later, my Embryolisse arrived. According to the return address, the sale had been completed by a retailer called Unineed, based in the United Kingdom (though it was shipped from Texas). A week after that, I received my $3 moisturizer from Young Vision Beauty, shipped from Foshan, China. I so wanted to just apply both to my skin, but I first shipped them to cosmetic chemist Mary Berry, who works out of Austin’s Cosmos Labs, to assess them on a more scientific level.
If you assemble a face from the best-selling beauty products on TikTok Shop this year, it will feature eyelids draped in furry, magnetic lashes, lips glassed in Summer Fridays Dream Lip Oil, and metallic eye shadow (still). The skin will have the satin-matte finish of Tarte Shape Tape, which the brand’s founder, Maureen Kelly, tells us is the number one concealer in America; it certainly appears to be one of the most popular on TikTok.
Kelly calls me from her hotel room during a family vacation, having just finished a marathon press campaign to kick off the year. Her brand’s 25th birthday was celebrated on TikTok with International Shape Tape Week, which coincided with live programming in cities nationwide and a digital festival of influencer content. Of course, the biggest draw was a promotion on TikTok Shop and at Ulta. For one week only, the concealer was half off—$15, usually $32. Before the promotion, one Shape Tape sold every few seconds; during the promotion period, it sold a few every second, according to the brand. “We beat our online and TikTok Shop projection for the sale, like, by an insane amount,” Kelly tells me. (Tarte declined to share exact sales figures.)
Kelly insisted that Tarte have a presence on TikTok back when it was called Musica.ly and was mostly occupied by teenagers. Today her brand’s commitment to the platform, and now to the Shop, is a case study in progress. Kelly says Tarte was an early invitee to the Shop. “We were identified as one of the high-performing brands, which is really exciting,” she adds. “There hasn't been a new retail channel for beauty in years. I have a gut feeling this is going to be something we all love.”
Kelly notes that a viral moment on TikTok also corresponds to bumps in the brand’s retail numbers at places like Ulta. A teen may see the viral whatever-it-is but want to swatch shades first. (Whether brick-and-mortar retailers also feel the love from TikTok is forthcoming information; Ulta, for instance, has commissioned analysts to look into how the Shop may impact business.) But brands that don’t have a vast retail network can also thrive; for them, the TikTok Shop provides the only sales floor they need.
Stormi Steele, a hairstylist who makes her own serums and glazes under the brand name Canvas, likes that the Shop puts her in the pocket of her customers. “To be able to connect with our consumers and not just put paid media in front of people,” she says, “it changed our entire landscape.”
Kyle Evanko, Canvas’s chief operating officer, says the brand hasn’t spent a dime on TikTok ads since it achieved virality in 2020. Canvas’s signature Body Glaze, packaged to resemble a glazed donut, has been viewed 100 million times, mostly thanks to Steele’s own efforts, he adds. TikTok Shop allows other creators to sell Body Glaze themselves, with some making as much as $10,000 in affiliate commission per week, according to Evanko.
The TikTok Shop makes moguls as if by magic. Or maybe it’s by machine. Evanko was an early American employee at Bytedance, the technology company that owns TikTok. (Noted in the Shop’s policies: “If you own a brand, TikTok Shop provides service partners to help you grow your content, build your audience base, and manage your brand’s daily Shop operations.”) The available evidence strongly suggests that a foot in the Shop door early on can pay off in forging an audience and maintaining a place in an ever-shifting algorithmic landscape.
Cait Kiernan, a former fashion and beauty editor who pivoted to live selling on Amazon in 2016, was skeptical of TikTok Shop when she first heard about it last year. She applied to be a seller anyway, and was accepted. Within 24 hours, Kiernan says, she received “hundreds” of emails from third-party vendors recommending their wares. She recognized some of the products and reached out to the brands to verify that the vendor was legit, but never heard back. When she hosted Amazon Style Code Live, a QVC-like shopping show, Kiernan was permitted to sell only from first-party vendors—like Tarte, which was supplying its own inventory directly.
A TikTok spokesperson assures me that all sellers require documentation including government-issued ID, and businesses require certifications that include a license from a government agency, and the company performs regular audits to ensure this information is up to date. They also police for dupes and counterfeit products. It’s a valiant and seemingly ongoing crusade. Whenever I look at the TikTok Shop, I am served an endless stream of what savvy beauty consumers would recognize as dupes, such as Baccarat Rouge 540 (Macarena Paris Boulevard) and Dior Lip Glow (FanJiao Lip Glow Oil).
On Amazon we have been trained to look for authorized storefronts, which are identified by a banner at the top of the product-display page, a link to “visit the [brand] store,” or tagged, right above the price tag, with “premium brand sourced.” On TikTok, authorized sellers are indicated by a shopping bag icon on their profile page. If you buy Shape Tape from the Tarte page, the order is fulfilled by the company itself, as if you bought it from the brand’s website. Embryolisse USA’s official TikTok account does have a Shop page, as do some of its authorized retailers, like Revolve, but none of them are offering their star product at even near the fire-sale price for which I got it.
There’s also a much more laborious approach to evaluating the beauty products you buy on the internet: You can send them away to a cosmetic chemist for official testing. A week after sending my products to Mary Berry, I called her; the results were in. A preservative test found my Embryolisse and Ibcccndc moisturizers clean of microbial activity, so safe to apply to human skin. The Embryolisse also seemed chemically identical to the tube of full-price, 100% authentic Embryolisse that Berry had on hand; slight differences in packaging and consistency, however, indicated that it was of an older vintage.
Berry observed that the ingredient lists of the Ibcccndc and CeraVe moisturizers were nearly identical; however, the textures of the respective formulas were not. She showed me on Zoom how the Ibcccndc cream, which she called "soupy," sloshed around in its jar. “It could be that they are using the [same] ingredients, but in ratios that don't make a cream,” she explained, hypothesizing that there was an imbalance of xanthan gum, a type of thickening agent.
The fog of my score began to dissipate by this point. And would you believe that, about a month after my order was placed, my Baccarat Rouge 540 has yet to arrive? TikTok Shop informed me via email that orders not shipped within a timely manner will be automatically canceled (and presumably, refunded), and yet there it still was: “We’re sorry your order is late, but it should arrive within a few days.” In the end, I had to dispute the charge with my credit card company. TikTok Shop has extended me a $6.42 coupon for my inconvenience. When I click over to Restaurant Fried Chicken Group LLC, it says the shop has closed for business. “It’s the Wild West right now,” Kiernan tells me. “You just have to be your own cowboy.”
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Originally Appeared on Allure
