If this is TikTok’s last Christmas in America, it’s not going out quietly.
The social media platform’s shopping arm, TikTok Shop, has seen heavy levels of consumer spending so far this holiday shopping season, Reuters reported Saturday (Dec. 7), citing its own analysis of spending patterns measured by data firm Facteus.
That data showed U.S. spending on TikTok Shop surpassing spending on Shein and Temu in the seven days leading up to Cyber Monday. According to Reuters, Facteus said its data comes from 140 million consumer debit and credit cards accounting for 7% to 10% of all U.S. spending.
In late November, TikTok Shop announced that its sales had reached $100 million on Black Friday, after previously revealing that the number of people purchasing goods on TikTok Shop each month had nearly tripled.
However, the company’s future in the U.S. is uncertain, as a ban on TikTok is set to kick in next month unless its China-based owner ByteDance divests itself of the company.
ByteDance has been fighting the ban in court, and lost a battle in that war last week when a U.S. appeals court ruled that the law requiring it to sell TikTok does not violate the First Amendment. The ruling means the ban will go into effect unless the app is sold or the Supreme Court steps in.
“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote for the panel, per a Bloomberg News report. “Here the government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.”
TikTok said in a statement on the decision that it expects the Supreme Court to protect “Americans’ right to free speech” on this issue as the court has done historically.
“Unfortunately, the TikTok ban was conceived and pushed through based upon inaccurate, flawed and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship of the American people,” the statement said.
If the ban does go into effect, merchants in the U.S. will be among those who suffer, Erik Huberman, CEO of marketing agency Hawke Media, which has clients selling goods through the platform, told Reuters.
“TikTok Shop is a new distribution channel and brands are doing really well on it,” Huberman said. “Honestly, there isn’t an alternative. It will be a lost revenue stream.”
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