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Have you also seen this while scrolling on TikTok lately? This little icon here, Shop. "TikTok Shop" "Guys, check this out. Look at this deal." "If you have a long day planned in heels, these are going to be a lifesaver." "I'm so obsessed, it's so angelic." "Please get this black dress." "A moment for the leggings please!" "If you wanna pick it up, get it while it's cheap." This is a new feature hyper-engineered to make you buy more, faster and without even really thinking about it.
The thing is, I don't need any of these products, but I want them. It's expanding worldwide. "TikTok Shop in Spain." And is coming for SHEIN, Temu and Amazon. TikTok shop is using every trick in the book, but on steroids. I want to find out how this works and if these products are any good. And the only way to do that is to tap buy. Influencers trying to sell products is nothing new. But TikTok shop is a whole other beast. You can buy all of these products then and there, without ever leaving the app.
The video is still running. The video is even running here. I literally just have to tap once and then I bought it. It's so quick. It's less than 30 seconds. And then basically I can just go back and then continue watching. It often combines the ultra low prices of SHEIN and Temu with enticing product demonstrations, like on home shopping channels, and arguably the most powerful algorithm in the world. And you can find anything. Kitchen utensils, LED lights, clothes.
"Oh, awesome. Just an amazing deal." These videos are so good at getting me to buy it because look at it. It looks amazing. Like if it actually worked this way, it would be fabulous. So I'm just going to take the liberty and this experiment and actually order the heck out of the TikTok shop. TikTok shop first launched in Indonesia in 2021 and has been expanding steadily around the world. The app currently has almost two billion users globally, So this is a potential goldmine.
"All of you should go live on TikTok shop. It's the biggest opportunity." Analysts estimate sales have been doubling for the last two years, and that they were just short of the GDP of Slovenia in 2025. Main products: Beauty, women's fashion and home supplies. While they also offer products from well-known brands, most of the items I saw were from unknown manufacturers. To find out how it works behind the scenes, we met one of the biggest TikTok shop creators in Germany. "Hello." "Hey, I am Kiyo." Katja has been the shop creator since it launched here in 2025.
She started with YouTube. "Hello! Welcome to our house tour!" And moved on to TikTok in 2019, gaining almost 400,000 followers since. As a mother of two, she was looking for a flexible, part-time job. "This is where I store all the TikTok shop products that need to be posted: beauty and hair products, household supplies kid's stuff, electronics, everything. A lot of fashion as well. Bikinis for summer - tops, shape wear, fitness wear. Fitness always does well. This is my perfume collection, all from TikTok shop.
My Maybelline collection, my lash collection. Skincare products, they sell really well. Massage roller, whitening stripes, watermelon Jell-O. I think it's more effective to sell through us than just selling on a website. Because we showcase the product and can answer questions in livestreams and in the comments." "The shops send out free samples. They send requests to us creators. I receive so many of them every day, at least 10 to 20. Then I decide whether this product fits me and my community. And then it gets delivered right to my home."
"Hi! Thank you." "These are herbs, witch's herbs." "I'm looking at the TikTok Shop Creator Center. I just tap it. This product is called Cortisol Balance. They are small packets that you can take." "Look-it's a powder. I always drink this when I'm stressed and my cortisol levels are spiking. Inside, it's got Ashwagandha, L-theanine, magnesium, Vitamin B6, and Vitamin B12."
"Now I'm just going to tap on this right here and edit it. I like to show the product right away in the hook. I'm zooming in. Us creators always have to keep people engaged. Then I post it." "If you're as stressed as I am, I can recommend this." I need to post the cordless vacuum cleaner." "How many vacuum cleaners do you own?"
"I even have a Christmas vacuum cleaner." "This is.a Christmas vacuum cleaner!" "And is it a problem that you're promoting competing products? "So far, no one has complained." "Let's throw this on the ground and test it. I'm really curious." "It's annoying that it doesn't stay upright. Should I mention it? I don't know yet. Five layers of multi-cone conical fine filtration. man.
Sometimes I print stuff out." "I've tested out a cordless vacuum cleaner for you. Also in the TikTok Shop it's a spring deal!" "Then I'll sit here and edit it right away." "How long does a video take?" "If I make an effort, half an hour. I usually budget about 20 to 30 minutes per video. Three to ten [videos] per day would be good. Right now, because of the deals, we're supposed to do 30 to 50 a day. which really is a lot." In peak season before Christmas, the targets were even higher.
"We were told a hundred videos per day. But nobody can do that." "So TikTok said that?" "Yeah. A hundred. But I was always posting about 30 videos a day during November and December." TikTok has since restricted the number of videos creators can post. It's around 30 videos a day, depending on the region. "You don't have a warehouse here, how do the products get to customers?" "Most products are shipped directly from their warehouses.
[The sellers] need to be based in Germany. Or from the TikTok Shop warehouse, they have them in Germany now, like Amazon warehouses." She also does live streams where she can directly link product she's using. "This pot set is in the shop, this pot as well. It comes as a complete set including a frying pan. You want to see the pot now, right? I'll link it for you. Boom, pinned." For every product she sells, Katja gets a commission, which can vary.
"Sometimes it's just 3%, 5%, sometimes 20%. For example, right here it says €50 - and I would get €5." "What do you earn per month?" "A few thousand euros." "Can you be a bit more specific?" "It can be two- to three-figures it can also be four or five figures." The creators can see exactly how much they have sold and what they are currently making in the app. But how exactly is TikTok enticing us to buy more, faster?
"It's quite different from, most of what we've seen so far. It's really engineered, behaviorally designed." This is Lucia Reisch, an economist who has consulted the EU and the World Bank on consumer behavior. "It does use the whole toolbox of what is known, of what we call sometimes dark patterns, so kind of sneaky design features." There are a lot of these at play in the shop. First, the classics: Urgency. Expiring coupons. Lowest price in 30 days. All of this is amplified when it's done in a live stream format. Then: Repeated exposure.
I swear to God, they want to sell me this gimbal because I've seen it 20 times in the last 30 minutes. And a lot of the products are much cheaper than what we're used to paying for comparable items. This is of course the SHEIN and Temu model. But TikTok goes many steps further. It not only knows your preferences, it knows when you're most vulnerable to impulse buying. "So, one user might be particularly interested in getting entertained or distracted in the morning, and another one could be in the evening. So there's a lot of information available. In decision sciences, there's a very broad distinction
between system 1 and system 2 decisions. So system 1 is the quick, intuitive, impulsive, emotional decision-making. Like habits or, you know, things we don't really pay attention to. And system 2 decisions are made based on deliberation, 'I need something', and they also take longer, and are ideally more informed. And it's of course much easier, for any platform or any marketing person, if system 1 is on the driver's seat. And that's ideal when the focus and the intention is not shopping. The next strategy: Social validation. Looking to others to confirm our own choices. And some of these videos are like hyper-viral.
I really just want to buy it just because it seems like everybody else is buying it. And it seems like such a steal. And then of course the ultra-fast shopping experience, similar to Amazon's one click shop button. But for some products, you can only check out directly. This can encourage impulse shopping, and it also makes it harder to compare prices. You can also lose track of the total amount you're spending, because you're buying bits and bobs without ever seeing the full amount you've spent. Now, the only thing left to do is to find out how good these things from the shop are. I'm so excited to open this.
Let's start with this one. This came much faster than I expected. I thought it would take weeks. I think all of this was here within the week. The legendary TikTok leggings. How is this size L? Look at it! It's tiny. Oh my God. I literally felt like a sausage. I'm definitely not going to work out in this. I'm going to sweat everything off. It is compressing me. Maybe. Maybe that's the point. It's like shapewear and it's supposed to, like, lift your butt up.
I'm unsure. This is a no for me. Hopefully it gets used again by somebody, worn again, because I have worn this out by just trying to get into it. Next. The orange dress that I was looking at. Tada! I think it's again, a bit too big for me. It's see-through. I don't know whether I want to show this on camera! I can kind of see like the seams here and it's not, you know, it doesn't look really nice. This is how it's supposed to look.
This is how it looks. This could maybe be a bit of a problem. Fabric feels nicer than the orange one. See, the sizing is a bit all over the place. I have to say. Okay, this is absolutely ridiculous. The fact that this is the same size as the orange one is also quite wild. Definitely. It looks a bit in the pictures as if there was like more support, maybe a wire in there or something, but there's literally like nothing. On to the electronics.
I hope it's going to be a better showing. Okay. It's getting heated up. Oh, it's changing colour. I have to say, it doesn't go as smoothly as it looks in the videos. To your right is where I steamed it, and this side is the one without steaming. So you can definitely see a difference. It doesn't look as magic as it does on the videos, but it does a halfway decent job I would say. Next one is the tablet.
I have to say the like quite pixelated image on the carton does not inspire a lot of confidence. But we should not judge a book by its cover. The reaction to my touch is better than I thought it would be. Is the sound great? No. Is the picture quality the most amazing? Not necessarily. I mean, it's fine. It's okay. It's, like, not the best thing, but it is actually working, which I didn't think it would, to be honest.
I'm going to take a picture of our lovely cameraman. Yeah. Oh, this is fun. This is cute. We paid 70 euros, so, I don't know how long it's going to last, but the first impression is not the worst. I contacted multiple consumer rights organizations and certification companies to get their take on the quality. But they didn't want to give us an opinion before doing extensive tests. But many products from similar online retailers have proven to be unsafe and should not have been sold in the EU. Most of the products I ordered I could also have gotten on Temu, or SHEIN or even on Aliexpress, sometimes for much cheaper. So it's not that these products are unique to TikTok Shop.
A lot of these manufacturers seem slightly dodgy to say the least. The steamer has a website with a pretty fake-sounding backstory. So we couldn't find the tablet. XBJ DE does not have its own website. A bit of a red flag. I don't know where it's being produced. I don't know where it comes from. To find out more about the quality, I went to a volunteer repair workshop in Berlin. "Hello." "I'm Kiyo from DW." "I've got a steamer here." "Yes, a steaming iron." "Well, in terms of quality, I'd say it looks good. If it were to break it would be hard to take it apart - because there are no screws."
"So it's hard to repair unless you're a real expert?" "Definitely." "With cheaper products, is it hard to get replacement parts?" "It depends. A battery can be easy to get, but smaller switches can be hard. If it's really cheap, people tend to throw it away, they don't come to repair it. Nowadays, a lot is made of plastic, which is becoming thinner and lighter. That means they can break more easily - if they are dropped or handled roughly." Which brings us to the elephant in the room: Waste.
Electronic waste is one of the fastest growing types of waste worldwide. Per capita, we throw away about eight kilograms of it every year. And about 80% of that doesn't get recycled properly. Precious materials are lost, toxins leaching out of landfills. And I'm sure you've heard a lot about fast fashion's waste problem. As you can imagine, instant accessibility and social media micro trends are accelerating this problem big time. The fashion industry is responsible for 8 to 10% of global carbon emissions. Only about 1% of clothing is recycled into new garments. That cute top made from polyester?
It can release tens of thousands of microplastic particles. Speaking of waste: so it's a few weeks later, this tablet does not charge properly unless I plug it into my power bank. And that's slightly annoying. I did order the dress now in the right size and it looks much better. I couldn't return a lot of the products because I missed that 30 day return window, which obviously is my bad. But the ones that I was on time for, they gave me a refund and just told me to keep the product. This is a common practice. Amazon calls it a "returnless refund". This is often done because processing the return can cost more than the actual product itself. So I'm sitting on a lot of things that I can't really use,
and I hope I can re-sell them. The only product that I could return was the steamer. Which to be honest, I was sad about. That was my favorite. "People say that it makes you buy faster and easier - making us buy more. That may be problematic. How do you see this criticism?" "It might be encouraged more because the process is so fast and it feels so real and authentic. TikTok wants us to stay authentic.
I think it's a good thing, because I know my job is secure, I can provide for my family. Of course, there is a risk of shopping addiction, because it happens so fast. Video, tap, tap, cart, checkout. There is always a risk, you can't rule it out. But everyone has to be responsible for themselves." I contacted TikTok shop Germany and had a call with their press person. I wanted to know whether they are addressing overconsumption and excessive impulse shopping, and what they think of the environmental impact of ultra-fast retail.
They did not want to go on the record and stopped replying to my emails. But in a press release from 2022, they describe their shopping experience as an infinite loop of discovering products, considering, purchasing, reviewing and then back to purchasing and discovering even more products. More recently, they emphasized that they are taking down prohibited or restricted products and screen sellers carefully to ensure "transparency and community protection". But environmentalists are not the only ones with concerns. Indonesia's government feared that TikTok shop could endanger small businesses, as well as its own e-commerce platforms, and banned it at the end of 2023.
A new law mandated a strict separation between social media and e-commerce. But TikTok has since bought a majority stake in a local e-commerce company and forwards its users to that platform, making the buying experience similar to before. The European Union launched an investigation into TikTok's addictive design and has announced that the company was breaching the Digital Services Act. TikTok has since changed its ads policy. Sellers now have to clearly label ads, as well as AI-generated content. You also need a verified account to post ads. But apps like TikTok are designed to get you subconsciously.
And it's hard to regulate the subconscious. Meaning that right now it's sadly mostly up to us consumers to resist the urge and maybe have a little think before we tap buy. So what can we do? Even if it's presented by influencers we know that doesn't mean it'll look the way it looks in the video. They are being paid to promote it. It's an ad. Don't connect an easy payment system to the app. If we really want it, we'll probably go looking for our credit card and type it all in.
Put in a cooling-off period. We can add it to the card and leave it there for a day or two. If we still want it then, we can decide whether we really need it. Or whether TikTok is making us buy it. The planet and your wallet will thank you. So have you been tempted or even bought something from TikTok shop? How was it? Please let us know in the comments and please subscribe to Planet A for more videos like this.
