Podean, a global marketplace agency, says it is fielding dozens more brand inquiries per month compared to this time last year. The contracts being signed are 12 months or longer. And the brands writing those checks aren’t startups. Sales from brands with $30 million or more in annual revenue grew 97% year over year on TikTok Shop, with transaction volume climbing nearly 80%. Ulta Beauty and Sally Beauty have both announced storefronts recently. PepsiCo has heavily invested too. 

“We are also seeing a gradual uptick in enterprise-level brands seeking TikTok Shop agency expertise as it’s a platform that truly takes a village to manage.” said Jack Johnston, vp, social innovation and growth at Tinuiti. 

Marketers, as a result, expect their agencies to know it inside out. 

“I can 100% attest to this being the case, particularly TikTok Shop is now being planned and measured in the same way Amazon/Walmart are,” said one agency exec who preferred to remain anonymous. “We are seeing a ton of retail clients (in particular managers of e-commerce, retail and shopper budgets) push to TikTok Shops for both direct gross merchandise value and ROAS but also as a stellar awareness and consideration channel which may end up converting elsewhere.”

In some ways, it’s a natural consequence of the growth in spending overall on the TikTok app. Once marketers started paying big sums to reach people on TikTok, spending to convert them there as well is the path of least resistance. TikTok has structured the commercial incentives to make it feel like the logical next step.  

Zeno Group’s svp of paid media Shamsul Chowdhury said TikTok has firmly established itself as a serious consideration for retail marketplaces, increasingly featuring as a core part of discussions around revenue generation.

“We are seeing TikTok fall more and more into the competitive set for DR focused clients,” Chowdhury continued. “CPMs are still low and ROAS is proving to be strong, especially with TikTok Shop.” 

For advertisers looking for a credible alternative to Google, Meta and Amazon that also reaches a younger audience, TikTok is making a case for itself. It’s focusing efforts on bringing larger, more recognizable, brands to the platform.

Jai Amin, Jellyfish’s chief solutions officer, media activation, said he can attest to seeing TikTok Shop increasingly within RFPs for commercial brands, due to a greater emphasis on the one-click end-to-end retail journey. 

“Where Amazon and Walmart are still perceived as high intent search engines, TikTok captures a different audience segment in a different phase of the purchase cycle,” Amin added. “By including TikTok Shop, brands are looking to unlock incremental audiences, meet audiences where they are, simplify cart completion and mitigate risk from focusing on legacy commerce platforms.”

Even agencies that don’t lead with TikTok are feeling the shift.

Acadia, which manages Amazon and Walmart strategies for mid-market and enterprise brands, says clients who never mentioned TikTok in their briefs are now asking their existing agency teams to factor it in. In the last six months it has seen three RFPs explicitly name TikTok Shop alongside Amazon and Walmart. Small number, but for an agency that previously saw none, it’s notable. “I’m up from an end of zero to an end of two,” said Jared at Acadia. “This is the start of a signal.”

It’s a similar perspective to New Engen’s CEO Justin Hayashi, who said he’s seen clients ask about TikTok Shop “more frequently.”

“Adoption varies significantly by brand maturity,” he said. “Disruptor CPG brands have been quicker to embrace Shop, while established brands are taking a more measured approach.”

Part of what unlocked this was simply the resolution of TikTok’s legal status in the US. Brands had been sitting on their hands for two years, unwilling to commit budget to a platform that might not exist in six months. “We’ve basically had to write a POV to clients every month for two years about whether it was going to be around,” said Chris Sheldon, director of global consulting at Podean. “That was a pretty significant headwind.”

The data firms are seeing the shift too. Connecting a new sales channel to a measurement platform isn’t a casual decision — it requires technical integration, internal sign-off and a commitment to track performance properly. Which is why the rate at which brands are plugging TikTok Shop into Prescient AI’s platform stands out. The measurement firm says a new connector is being added almost every two to three days. 

“It’s very rare that more than two to three days goes by where we’re not seeing a TikTok Shop pop into the model,” said Mike True, the company’s CEO. 

But before anyone declares TikTok Shop the new Amazon, it’s worth understanding what’s actually driving the interest — because it’s not the direct sales numbers.

All three agencies spoken to for this piece said TikTok Shop’s attributed revenue often looks poor or outright loss-leading on its own. The real value is what it does to sales everywhere else. Brands running creator content through TikTok Shop’s GMV Max — TikTok Shop’s equivalent of Smart+ or Meta’s Advantage+, consolidating everything into a single content-fed auction — are seeing measurable lifts on Amazon, Walmart and in physical retail that dwarf what the platform claims direct credit for. Prescient AI is working with a large supplement brand that used GMV Max as an upper-funnel awareness play and saw attributable lift across multiple retail partners including Walmart, Target and Whole Foods. “When you have full visibility and can tell a brand to attribute X percent of sales on other channels to their TikTok investment, it starts to look like a completely different picture,” said Acadia’s Matt. For most brands they work with, he added, TikTok Shop is a loss-leading channel — and they’re increasingly fine with that.

The affiliate economics help explain the initial appeal. Unlike Amazon, where brands pay per click and hope for conversion, TikTok Shop charges a percentage only on completed sales. The impressions — potentially millions of them — are effectively free. The creator gets paid for the sale. The brand gets the awareness for nothing.

That model only works at scale, and scale on TikTok means content volume. The brands winning on the platform are producing hundreds — sometimes thousands — of pieces of creator video, iterating rapidly until something breaks through. “That is a completely different muscle from mastery of Amazon sponsored search and DSP,” said Jared. “Wildly different.”

Which points to the uncomfortable truth beneath all of this RFP activity: nobody has truly cracked who should own TikTok Shop, inside brands or outside them. Social agencies understand creators but not marketplaces. Marketplace agencies understand commerce but not creator-led content. The most successful TikTok Shops tend to be run in-house rather than by agencies — Bloom Nutrition, which Sheldon estimates does $2.5 to $3 million a year on the platform, being the clearest example. “It seems to have been an internal evolution of the social team rather than an agency RFP that was brought in for capabilities,” he said.

For now the RFPs keep coming, the measurement connectors keep being added, and the halo effect keeps showing up in the data. TikTok Shop is in the brief. What brands do with it once the agency is hired is a different question entirely.

TikTok did not respond to Digiday’s request for comment.