TikTok Shop Nears $23 Billion as Oracle Cashes In

TikTok Shop is projected to hit $23.41 billion in US sales this year. That would put the three-year-old storefront ahead of the individual online sales operations of Target, Costco, Best Buy and Kroger, according to eMarketer’s forecast. The app has only been selling goods to American shoppers since September 2023.

That number gets repeated everywhere. What gets left out is who cashes the checks now. Since January 22, TikTok’s American business has answered to a majority US ownership group built around Oracle, Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi’s MGX, so the ground TikTok Shop is taking from Target and Kroger’s websites now shows up, at least in part, on ledgers built far from Beijing.

Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX Now Run the Books

The joint venture that owns TikTok’s American operations closed on January 22, 2026, a day ahead of the deadline set by the 2024 law ordering ByteDance to sell down its stake or face a ban. That law had taken effect on January 19, 2025, and a year of executive orders delayed enforcement while negotiators worked out a structure.

What emerged is called TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX each hold 15 percent. Existing ByteDance investors, including Susquehanna International, KKR, General Atlantic and Michael Dell’s family office, control roughly another 30 percent. ByteDance itself kept 19.9 percent, just under the 20 percent ceiling the law set for a foreign adversary stake.

Adam Presser was named chief executive of the new entity in January. He answers to a seven member board where Americans hold the majority of seats, including Silver Lake co-CEO Egon Durbin, TikTok global chief executive Shou Chew, and directors tied to Oracle, Susquehanna and MGX.

Each of those five owners now has a direct financial stake in whether TikTok Shop keeps growing, even though none of them sell a single product on the app itself.

A Three-Year Sales Sprint

Growth is slowing in percentage terms and speeding up in dollars. eMarketer’s forecast puts 2025 US sales at $15.82 billion, up 108 percent year over year, with 2026 adding a smaller 48 percent jump that still works out to more new revenue than the prior year’s doubling did.

Share is consolidating too. TikTok Shop held 18.2 percent of US social commerce in 2025, and eMarketer expects that to reach 24.1 percent by 2027, a sign that dollars are concentrating on one platform instead of spreading across rivals.

Put plainly, the platform added more raw revenue this year growing 48 percent than it did the year it doubled. That is what a maturing, high-volume channel looks like from the inside.

Why Does TikTok Shop Convert Four Times Better Than Facebook?

TikTok Shop converts at 4.7 percent, against 2.1 percent on Instagram Shopping and 1.8 percent on Facebook Shops, roughly a 2.6 times gap between the leader and the laggard. The difference comes down to format. TikTok compresses discovery and checkout into one scrolling session, while the other two still push buyers toward a separate purchase step.

That gap decides whether paid traffic works at all. At 1.8 percent, a seller needs cheap clicks and fat margins to survive. At 4.7 percent, a mid-margin product can absorb realistic acquisition costs and still turn a profit.

Livestreaming carries a lot of that intent. US livestream ecommerce sales grew nearly 50 percent in 2025 to $14.64 billion, with buyers up 21.5 percent year over year. Brands running TikTok livestreams saw sales jump 84 percent during Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2025.

Other apps are racing to copy the same trick. eCosmetics built its own live-auction app for beauty shopping, betting that the one-session jump from watching to buying matters as much as the platform underneath it.

Oracle’s New Business Line Is Your Shopping Cart

A securities filing covering the period ended February 28, 2026 showed Oracle’s stake in the joint venture is worth about $2 billion, part of a broader $2.2 billion the company logged as non-marketable debt and equity investments, according to Reuters. Oracle reiterated its board seat on its own earnings call the same week.

• Data storage: US user data now sits in Oracle’s American cloud centers rather than infrastructure controlled by ByteDance.
• Algorithm: the recommendation engine deciding what shows up in a shopper’s feed is being retrained on US data with Oracle auditing the process.
• Compliance: Oracle acts as the outside monitor validating that data handling and moderation rules are followed.
• Balance sheet: Oracle now carries its roughly $2 billion stake as a single non-marketable investment line.

Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison holds influence over the new venture through the company’s board seat. He is also, per Deadline’s reporting, the largest investor in Paramount Skydance, the studio run by his son David Ellison that has been pursuing Warner Bros. Discovery, putting one family’s money behind both a shopping app and a chunk of Hollywood at the same time.

The arrangement hit its first real snag in March. The joint venture posted an update on X about a technical problem.

An issue with an Oracle data center is impacting some parts of the TikTok U.S. user experience.

The post added that creators might see posting delays while Oracle worked through the problem. Service was fully restored three days later, the company said, a small reminder that TikTok Shop’s uptime now depends on Oracle’s infrastructure as much as ByteDance’s.

Kroger and Target Feel the Squeeze Online

Kroger’s own numbers show how close this comparison already is. The grocer’s e-commerce sales crossed $16 billion in fiscal 2025, up from more than $13 billion the year before, Kroger’s fourth quarter and full year results showed. TikTok Shop’s projected $23.41 billion this year would clear that by more than $7 billion.

Scale it up and the picture gets starker. Costco alone rang up $183.05 billion in total US retail sales in 2024, and Walmart topped $568.70 billion, according to the National Retail Federation’s Top 100 Retailers data. Those are whole-company figures, not e-commerce alone, which is exactly the point. TikTok Shop does not need to out-earn Costco’s stores. It only needs to keep taking a growing slice of the online piece those chains increasingly depend on.

Expect the usual playbook in response: fee holidays, richer creator payouts, cheaper ads, anything that narrows the conversion gap before more budget shifts away from a retailer’s own site.

What Oracle’s Next Earnings Call Actually Tests

Oracle’s overall guidance calls for roughly $67 billion in revenue this fiscal year and $90 billion the next, driven mostly by AI data center demand. Against that, a $2.2 billion stake is small money. What is not small is the positioning: a board seat, a cloud contract and a claim to being the trusted custodian of a platform now worth more in annual US sales than several household retail names.

What We Know

• The joint venture closed January 22, 2026, with Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX each holding 15 percent.
• Oracle’s stake is valued at about $2 billion, logged in its quarterly filing for the period ended February 28, 2026.
• TikTok Shop is projected to reach $23.41 billion in US sales this year.

What’s Unconfirmed

• How much of Oracle’s future revenue, if any, will be broken out as coming specifically from TikTok Shop commerce.
• Whether rival platforms can close the conversion gap before more ad budget shifts to TikTok Shop.
• How much practical influence ByteDance’s remaining 19.9 percent stake still carries over the algorithm.

Some shoppers are already pushing back against the same mechanics that make the app convert so well. One TikTok user found the one-tap convenience was draining her account and started blocking shopping apps at night, cutting her spending in half, the exact impulse mechanic sellers are chasing, working against her instead of for a merchant.

Whatever Oracle’s next earnings call shows, the sales chart keeps climbing regardless of who is asking the question. Every dollar TikTok Shop takes from a retailer’s website this year lands, at least in part, on ledgers built far outside Beijing now.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is TikTok banned in the United States right now?

No. A joint venture deal that satisfied the 2024 divest-or-ban law closed on January 22, 2026. Existing TikTok accounts, videos, followers and likes carried over automatically to the new entity, so users did not need to rebuild profiles.

How much of TikTok Shop’s revenue actually reaches Oracle?

Oracle does not break out TikTok Shop’s commerce revenue on its own. Its quarterly filing logs the roughly $2 billion stake as a single non-marketable investment line inside a wider $2.2 billion figure, and markets are watching upcoming earnings reports for the first real signs of what the app is worth to Oracle’s bottom line.

What happened to Amazon’s own version of TikTok Shop?

Amazon shut down Amazon Inspire, its short-form social shopping feed, in February 2025. The company chose instead to expand Amazon Live, which keeps shoppable livestream replays permanently on product pages long after the broadcast ends.

Does ByteDance still have any say over TikTok Shop’s algorithm?

ByteDance kept a 19.9 percent stake, just under the law’s 20 percent ceiling. The recommendation algorithm deciding what shoppers see is being retrained on US user data, with Oracle auditing that process under the joint venture agreement.

Why did a data center outage matter to sellers using the app?

In March 2026, an Oracle data center problem delayed posting for some US creators and sellers for a few days before the joint venture confirmed service was fully restored, a reminder that uptime for TikTok Shop sellers now depends on Oracle’s infrastructure as much as ByteDance’s.