TikTok has kicked off a fresh international campaign around its advertising business, but shopping is clearly the bigger focus behind it. The company is pushing harder into in-app commerce as it tries to turn casual scrolling into product discovery and direct sales.
The new slogan is “Watch It. Love it. Want It.” Short, simple, and aimed at how people already behave on the app. For years, TikTok was mostly seen as an entertainment platform. Viral dances, trends, memes, and short clips. That image is starting to shift. A growing number of users now treat the app like a search engine for products. They look up reviews, compare items, check creator opinions, and sometimes buy without ever leaving the platform.
TikTok wants brands to notice that change. The company says users are not opening TikTok just for entertainment anymore. Shopping has become part of the experience. A person may watch a skincare video first. Then they read comments. After that, they check another creator reviewing the same product. A few minutes later, they end up on the product page.
TikTok says this behavior is becoming common. Research from Ipsos supported that idea. The study ranked TikTok highest during the product consideration stage. In simple words, many users check TikTok before deciding what to buy. The numbers behind that are hard to ignore. The report said 93% of daily TikTok users research products on the app before making purchases.
In Europe, the shopping side is growing faster than many expected. In Germany, one in seven shoppers has bought something through TikTok at least once. In the UK, around 31% of online shoppers now purchase products through the platform. That would have sounded unrealistic a few years ago.
The company also revealed that more than 100,000 merchants across the European Union are now active on TikTok Shop. Small brands, beauty sellers, clothing stores, gadget pages, all trying to catch attention through short-form content instead of traditional online ads. Fashion remains the biggest category on the platform. That probably is not surprising. Clothing content already performs well naturally on TikTok because trends move fast there. Beauty comes right after fashion. Then categories like home products and tech.
TikTok Shop reported around 60% annual growth in beauty sales during 2025 in the UK alone. At one point, the platform became the country’s fourth-largest beauty retailer. That is a huge jump for an app that was once dismissed as a place mainly for dance videos. Part of the reason comes down to how products are shown. Most users are not watching polished commercials. They are seeing creators test products in bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, and cars. The content feels less staged, even when it is sponsored. That style works especially well with younger audiences who usually skip traditional advertising.
TikTok’s bigger plan looks similar to what ByteDance already achieved in China through Douyin, the local version of the app. Douyin mixed shopping and entertainment years earlier and turned it into a massive business. Reports from KrAsia said Douyin generated more than $500 billion in gross merchandise volume during 2025. GMV means the total value of products sold on a platform.
TikTok is still far behind that number globally. But its shopping business is growing fast. Reports from Marketing Maze estimated TikTok generated around $26.2 billion in GMV during the first half of 2025.
The company believes shopping habits are changing. People now spend more time researching products before buying them. That middle stage matters now. Brands call it the consideration phase. It is the moment where users compare options, watch reviews, and look for opinions before making decisions. TikTok thinks it can dominate that stage because discovery already happens naturally through content.
Before, companies had to spread campaigns across different apps. One platform for ads. Another for reviews. Another for checkout. TikTok wants all those steps to happen in one place. A user watches a video, becomes interested, checks comments, sees another review, opens a product listing, and buys. No switching platforms. No separate search process. That is the model TikTok is pushing now.
The company is no longer trying to position itself as only a social media app. It is moving toward something bigger, a platform where entertainment, advertising, and shopping blend almost without users noticing where one ends and the other begins.
