TikTok Shop’s first US Black Friday was a ‘blockbuster’ for some brands — but showcased one of the platform’s biggest weaknesses

“It went as good as we could have expected,” Dappz Sports founder Matt “Dappz” McGuckin told Business Insider. “We’re definitely happy with the sales that came through.”

TikTok Shop threw significant resources behind its first Black Friday and Cyber Monday push in the US, rolling out video and livestream contests for sellers and dangling 50%-off coupons to buyers. For one agency that works with Shop sellers, the length of the campaign, which kicked off in late October, was almost too much, removing a sense of urgency around the event for deal-seekers, the company told BI.

But for other e-commerce businesses like Dappz Sports, the holiday shopping rush generated a windfall in sales. These small or midsize companies with a particular focus on e-commerce made early bets on TikTok as a shopping platform and reaped the benefits last month as their followers cashed in on steep discounts, according to agencies that work with the businesses on their TikTok Shop strategies. Larger brands, however, ended up playing a smaller role in the Black Friday campaign, two Shop partner agency executives told BI.

“High-street brands were not performing as well as some of the more known TikTok Shop brands,” said Remy Beaumont, founder of the TikTok Shop partner agency Gen Z Media, referring to mainstream brands. “Just because they’re a big established name, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to get the lion’s share of sales.”

A TikTok spokesperson declined to comment on this story.

TikTok Shop has been a boon for small businesses, even as it’s been slow to win over bigger brands

Many of the early adopters of TikTok Shop have been smaller businesses that sell items like trading cards, novelty sweatshirts, or freeze-dried candies, though the company also works with some bigger partners like tech brand Anker, electronics retailer Newegg, and clothing brand PacSun. Several of the holiday’s success stories touted in The Information and Ad Age were direct-to-consumer brands like BK Beauty and fashion-brand Cider.

National or multinational brands with brick-and-mortar locations often have strategies aimed at directing traffic to their own stores, Black Friday and Cyber Monday websites, or apps, rather than TikTok’s shopping ecosystem.

This may be a reason blue-chip brands have been more reluctant to invest heavily in TikTok Shop. Gen Z Media’s Beaumont said his agency works with 10 to 15 brands a month on TikTok, and only three of them are bigger, mainstream companies.

“I think it’s quite a nice thing to see the smaller products that are flying off the shelves as opposed to these bigger companies having an absolute monopoly on it,” said Josh Lane, chief commercial officer at Grail Talent, another TikTok Shop partner agency.

Agency sources said that to tip the scales and find meaningful success on TikTok Shop, brands need to approach the platform as a sales and e-commerce platform akin to eBay or Amazon, rather than a social network made for marketing and awareness.

But TikTok Shop is still a new platform, and larger brands usually proceed cautiously with emerging channels, particularly during the most important shopping time of the year.

Book publisher HarperCollins, for example, has been on TikTok Shop for over a year, but Christina Storey, senior social-media and e-commerce executive, told BI the company is still experimenting with the platform and learning what works for its brand.

To get buy-in from bigger brands, the company has to prove it can support sales at a large scale.

“Customer service is really great, and I think they have the infrastructure to bring in bigger clients,” said Daniel Carvalho, director of social commerce at Grail Talent. “It’s so new.”

TikTok’s holiday blitz crowned a few big winners, but some felt the campaign dragged

TikTok began rolling out its battle plan for Black Friday and Cyber Monday weeks before holiday shopping officially kicked off. In materials sent to sellers, the company laid out an early Black Friday period that began on October 27 and ran through an extended Cyber Monday period ending on November 30.

The company offered incentives to post videos and host livestreams around the event. It also agreed to front the cost of promotional coupons of up to 50% or 60% off, depending on the country, as it looked to supercharge holiday sales, per documents and emails viewed by BI.

For some agencies that work with influencers and sellers on TikTok Shop, the lengthy Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaign paid off.

“We’ve had creators that have earned over 30 grand in commission this month,” Beaumont said. “It’s what we expected, and everyone’s pretty happy.”

Grail Talent’s Lane described Black Friday as a “blockbuster” moment. Two of the US-based creators who worked with the firm drove $58,000 and $37,000 each in product sales on Black Friday alone.

Other TikTok Shop agencies were less bullish.

Nicole Rechtszaid, cofounder of the social-shopping firm Ghost Agency, told BI that Black Friday and Cyber Monday on TikTok “weren’t as impactful as desired,” though the agency’s clients still saw “strong” month-over-month sales growth on the platform in November.

“The TikTok Shop campaign was too long for users,” Rechtszaid said in an email. The length of the campaign stripped away some of its urgency for buyers, she said.

“The main drivers of sales for our clients came from discounted products on the Shop tab and creator videos,” Rechtszaid said. “Some brands did see success through livestreams, but this did require either a major paid ads push and/or a major discount.”

As it reflects on its first big holiday season in the US, TikTok Shop’s team will likely be thinking about how to woo companies of all sizes for 2024.

“I’m sure over the next year they’re going to look at everything they did, what they did well, what they didn’t do well,” said Dappz Sports’ McGuckin.