TikTok to challenge Amazon Prime Day with its own sales event in July

TikTok is gearing up to challenge Amazon’s Prime Day event in the July. The social network announced on Thursday that TikTok Shop is holding a “Deals For You Days” sales event in the U.S. starting on July 9.

The announcement comes a few days after Amazon revealed that its annual Prime Day sales will take place on July 16 and 17.

The historical success of Prime Day has led to other retailers, both large and small, co-opting the day to run competing sales. Now you can count TikTok among those doing the same.

TikTok says the sales event will offer deals on fashion and beauty products, backyard entertainment essentials, decor, summer reading bestsellers, and more. Like Amazon’s Prime Day sales, TikTok Shop will offer exclusive deals on select products. The sales event will offer exclusive sales on products from L’Oréal Paris, Maybelline New York, NYX Professional Makeup, Our Place, Too Faced, and Zwilling USA.

During the sales event, brands and merchants will participate in content challenges for short videos and LIVE shopping events, where they can interact with their followers and share their favorite products and bestsellers. The LIVE events will offer discounts on popular products in real time.

TikTok has been betting big on its e-commerce efforts and is aiming to grow the size of its TikTok Shop U.S. business tenfold to as much as $17.5 billion this year. With this upcoming deals event, TikTok is looking to take on one of the largest sales events in the U.S. It’s worth noting that while this specific event appears to be targeting Amazon, TikTok Shop is also looking to take on fellow Chinese-owned companies Temu and Shein, both of which have become popular in the U.S. 

Last year, Bloomberg reported that TikTok was expected to amass around $20 billion in global gross merchandise value in 2023 and that the majority of the sales were seen in Southeast Asia. TikTok is now invested in bringing that success to the U.S.

TikTok’s ambitions for its e-commerce product aren’t surprising, as social commerce sales are expected to increase in the next few years. According to eMarketer forecasts, social commerce sales are expected to more than double to $144.5 billion by 2027 from $67 billion in 2023.