The social shopping platform’s health and beauty sales are up 84% year over year, with around one in 10 Americans having now made a purchase through the social-meets-shopping platform, according to market research platform Nielsen IQ.
Donte Murry, North America director of TikTok’s beauty, wellness and personal care vertical, has been with the platform for more than five years and told Glossy that the consumer behavior driving its sales success has been slowly evolving.
“What was true when I started at TikTok — that users are coming to the platform to discover new products — is still true, but I think [this] behavior is evolving,” Murry told Glossy.
For example, two of the biggest shifts in the past year include how prospective shoppers are using the app’s search function and an increase in how effective science-backed marketing is to sales conversion.
“[A large cohort of shoppers is] using search on TikTok immediately after they come across a product [they’re interested in],” he said. “Let’s say they come across affiliate content on TikTok Shop, where an affiliate [or creator] may have talked about a product. [The prospective shopper then] immediately starts searching more about it.”
According to Murry, after seeing affiliate content on TikTok, 77% of users search for the same product they just saw to learn more. This behavior has become a validation tool to see what other users are saying and how the brand positions its offerings.
The more positive, informative content they can find about said product or brand, the better the sales conversion will be, said Murry. This means brands should prioritize a mix of sponsored, affiliate, and educational content from creators and the brand that is easy to find based on relevant search terms.
“The kind of content that drives the first purchase is different from the kind of content that drives a repeat purchase,” Murray said. Today, top-performing content on TikTok falls into two buckets: comments by users, and educational content posted by creators or the brand or retailer.
One of the highest predicting factors of a first purchase is comments by other users. “Brands should then think about what you want to reverse engineer in the comments,” Murry said. “What kind of conversation do you want to start that can help influence that first purchase?”
However, a second purchase from the same brand is most often driven by tutorials and tips, specifically videos that share insights into why something works, the science behind it, the ingredients that power it and why these things result in overall value.
“The rise of [consumer] interest in science-backed content, or content that just talks about the ingredients [of a product], has been a huge, huge trend on the platform,” Murray said. “Some of the best performing content I’ve seen in the last year has been literally just someone in front of a whiteboard, or just someone running down the list of ingredients and explaining what they mean and why it might be a good fit for the customer.”
Today, the average TikTok Shop health and beauty consumer spends around $118 annually, split across three to four purchases. Top categories include supplements, skin care and fragrance, which closely mirrors category leaders across the industry’s top conglomerates and retailers like L’Oréal Group and Ulta Beauty.
TikTok first entered the U.S. market in 2017 and launched its e-commerce Shop platform in late 2023. It has since become the fourth largest health and beauty e-commerce retailer in the U.S., thanks to $4.4 billion in lifetime health and beauty category sales, according to Nielsen IQ.
“This growth represents a real shift in how shoppers discover, engage with and ultimately purchase their beauty and wellness products,” Anna Mayo, VP of beauty and personal care thought leadership at NIQ, said in a statement. “What’s showing up in our feeds is becoming just as important as what sits on the store shelves, and tomorrow’s winners will be the ones who adjust to this new reality.”