Summary:
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Whatnot closed a $545 million Series G at a $20 billion valuation, double its worth nine months earlier.
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TikTok Shop’s U.S. business grew 103% to $11.8 billion, with live selling down and Shop tab use up.
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Whatnot and eBay capitalize on live shopping for collectibles, showing a different approach than predicted for U.S. live commerce.
Whatnot closed a $545 million Series G on Aug. 7 at a $20 billion valuation, nearly double what the live commerce marketplace was worth nine months earlier, CNBC reported.
The company says it has already passed $8 billion in gross merchandise volume in the first half of 2026, which is more than it did in all of 2025, with over 650,000 people joining each week.
Live shopping in America is finally working. It just isn’t working the way anyone predicted, and the platform most people associate with it is the one losing ground.
TikTok Shop’s U.S. business grew 103% year over year to $11.8 billion in the first half of 2026, according to a report from Momentum Works and data platform Tabcut. Live selling accounted for 8.2% of that, down from 14% for full-year 2025. The Shop tab, where people browse a storefront and buy without watching anything, jumped to 51.4% from 36%.
Live isn’t collapsing there. In dollars it grew roughly 19%, from about $812 million to about $967 million. The rest of the platform simply grew faster. Momentum Works put it flatly, writing that Shop, not video or live, is now where sales actually close.
The comparison isn’t clean. Whatnot’s GMV covers every category and several countries, while the TikTok figure is U.S. live sales only. But the direction of each is hard to miss. One built a business where live is the entire product. The other is watching live thin out as a share of how people check out.
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The split makes sense once you look at why people open each app. Someone launching Whatnot came to buy. Someone opening TikTok came to watch, and buying is one thing they might do next.
That difference shows up in behavior. Whatnot says users average about 95 minutes a day in the app and that more than 80% come back month over month. Those are numbers you get when the shopping is the entertainment rather than an interruption of it.
Category matters too. Whatnot grew out of Funko Pops and trading cards, and its core still runs on collectibles, sports cards and resale fashion. Those goods are one of a kind, priced by auction and rewarded by urgency, which is exactly what a live format is good at. A restock of a moisturizer doesn’t need a countdown clock. A single graded rookie card does.
eBay has seen something similar in its own live business. On the company’s third quarter 2025 earnings call, CEO Jamie Iannone said the annual GMV run rate for live shopping was up roughly fivefold year over year. eBay’s inventory skews toward the same scarce, collectible categories.
McKinsey suggested years ago that if China was any guide, live commerce could account for 10% to 20% of all ecommerce by 2026. That hasn’t happened in the U.S. Livestream ecommerce sales grew nearly 50% in 2025 to $14.64 billion, with buyers up 21.5%, per an EMARKETER forecast published in January. Real growth, nowhere near a fifth of ecommerce.
Older projections ran far higher. Coresight Research put U.S. livestream sales near $50 billion in 2023 and forecast around $68 billion by 2026. Whatnot’s own report pegs the North America and Europe live shopping market at roughly $22 billion and claims close to 60% of it, though that’s a company sizing a market it leads, so treat both halves of that with care.
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What the forecasts got wrong wasn’t the growth. It was the assumption that live commerce would arrive in the U.S. the way it did in China, embedded in the big social feeds. Instead it landed in dedicated apps, in categories where scarcity does the persuading.
