US Livestream E-Commerce Is Heating Up — But It Looks Nothing Like China’s

[Ebrun Original] This marks Jude’s fifth year running livestreams on TikTok’s US platform. He has witnessed the full evolution of US livestream commerce: from the early semi-closed loop where livestreams redirected viewers to independent standalone websites to complete purchases, to the launch of TikTok Shop and the shift to a fully closed e-commerce ecosystem, and from an invite-only access model to full open access for sellers.

“For the past two years, concurrent viewers on our main account have held steady at 5,000, with average daily orders hitting 20,000. Livestreaming has already outperformed short video as our largest revenue driver,” Jude shared. They focus on fashion jewelry, plush toys, and beauty products. For jewelry and plush items, streams typically feature fluent English-speaking Chinese staff showcasing products with only their hands on camera, while beauty streams hire local US creators as on-air hosts. After TikTok Shop rolled out its livestream auction feature, the team quickly tested the format, with top-performing auction streams generating as much as $2,000 in sales per session.

Per his observation, TikTok Shop US began heavily promoting the auction format this year, leading to a notable surge in peer sellers joining the livestream space.

The momentum seen on TikTok Shop signals that livestream e-commerce across the US may finally be entering its mainstream growth phase. Per eMarketer projections, US livestream shopping sales will approach $20 billion this year, up roughly 35% year over year — more than double the 2024 figure. CNBC reports that compared to the same period in 2025, TikTok Shop’s US livestream sales more than doubled in the first half of 2026, with total livestream sessions rising over 60% and total livestream airtime up more than 80% over the same timeframe.

It is not just Chinese cross-border sellers capitalizing on the US livestream commerce boom. CNBC also profiled two standout homegrown US brands that built their success on livestreaming.

Hair tool brand Beachwaver runs hundreds of livestream shopping sessions annually, with cumulative TikTok Shop sales hitting $1 million, a quarter of which comes directly from livestream channels. In late July, a four-hour livestream featuring limited-edition product auctions, live demos, and interactive viewer rewards drove $8,000 in sales for the brand.

The other case is QVC, the legacy TV shopping brand that recently completed bankruptcy restructuring. QVC is now shifting its core business focus to digital channels, launching a 24/7 livestream channel on TikTok in April 2025. The brand added more than 1 million new customers on TikTok that year, and now streams for a combined total of over 200 hours per week across seven TikTok accounts. Patrick Nommensen, President of Strategic Business at TikTok Shop US, noted that legacy retail brands like QVC have emerged as some of the top-performing merchants on the platform.

Whatnot, a platform that built its early following livestreaming niche, novelty categories such as collectibles and designer toys, is also a key driver of the US livestream boom. Riding the at-home consumption surge during the COVID-19 pandemic, Whatnot’s livestream auction feature took off: its first livestream sold out all inventory, validating its model of “livestream product showcases + vertical interest-based communities.” Public data shows Whatnot hit $8 billion in GMV in 2025, with its latest valuation reaching $20 billion, double its valuation from October 2025.

While the growth of US livestream e-commerce is undeniable, it still lags far behind China’s massive livestream commerce market.

eMarketer forecasts China’s livestream e-commerce market will exceed $11 trillion by 2026, putting it miles ahead of the $20 billion US market.

The gap is even starker when looking at consumer shopping habits and the revenue split between livestream and short video content. A joint report from Momentum Works and Tabcut found that in 2025, short videos contributed roughly 50% of TikTok Shop US GMV, with in-app mall and search rising to a 36% share, while livestream shopping accounted for only 14%. In China, by contrast, livestream shopping is the dominant GMV driver for Douyin E-commerce, and the “shop while you watch” model has effectively reshaped consumer spending habits for an entire generation. While US livestream commerce is growing at a striking rate, its share of total e-commerce GMV remains far below that of short video, mall, and search channels.

More importantly, the real dividing line between Chinese and US livestream commerce may not be market size, but deeper differences in lifestyle and cultural norms.

“A big reason domestic consumers in China watch livestreams is that they lack free time — they don’t have time to go to the supermarket with their families. But in the US, grocery shopping is seen as a core family activity. People don’t want to spend large amounts of time shopping on entertainment platforms, and they especially don’t respond to high-pressure sales tactics,” said Ji Xiang, CEO of Chijing, an overseas influencer marketing service provider.

As a result, when it comes to content formats, US consumers tend to follow engaging KOLs, prefer highly entertaining livestreams, and are turned off by hard-sell pitches. Popular livestreams in the US market typically combine shopping with entertainment and social connection; “making a purchase is just a side effect of having fun,” as one industry observer put it. Some sellers note that paid ad performance during livestreams is relatively limited, with organic traffic still making up the majority of viewership for most streams.

Livestreaming is also heavily labor-dependent when it comes to on-air talent, representing another key difference between the two markets.

The labor cost for creator agencies to incubate and manage livestream accounts in the US is roughly seven times that of China. Most professional livestream hosts charge between $110 and $150 per hour, and typically require a minimum one-month commitment (100 hours of airtime). Testing a livestream strategy often requires an upfront investment of $12,000 to $15,000, a barrier that puts the channel out of reach for many small and medium-sized sellers.

At its core, the gap between Chinese and US livestream e-commerce is not just about scale, but about where livestreaming sits in the consumer purchase journey. In China, livestreaming functions as a high-density transaction conversion engine, with a core value proposition of shortening the purchase path and improving buying efficiency. In the US, by contrast, livestreaming is closer to entertainment content and interest-based community: users stay for the fun, interaction, and sense of companionship first, and purchases happen as a natural extension of that content experience.

For Chinese cross-border sellers, succeeding in US livestream e-commerce means ditching copy-pasted domestic playbooks. Instead, brands should focus on building long-term user trust through entertaining, interactive content, then capture sales conversions as a natural outcome of that relationship.

Ebrun will continue to track and report on this trend. For more related coverage, scan the QR code to follow the author’s WeChat account.

This article was first published on the official Ebrun website