• by Colin Kirkland , Yesterday

TikTok is changing the way businesses amass views on the company's e-commerce app’s main feed, potentially changing the way small businesses operate on the ByteDance-owned platform.

Instead of relying on gaining user engagement for free, brands will now need to pay for TikTok ads to maintain and/or increase the number of views they were previously receiving on the video-sharing app.

According to Business Insider, product sellers on TikTok Shop are no longer seeing the same user traffic they were accustomed to.

The report cites three company partners and two TikTok staffers who stated that the lapse of free views began last year, but has since become more dramatic.

In 2025, unpaid views and viral videos have become scarce for most TikTok merchants, pushing more sellers to pay for ads to promote their content and products.

Helping small businesses go viral and drive traffic for free was part of TikTok's strategy to build out its Douyin-modeled e-commerce push in the West.

Within less than two years, TikTok Shop has become the fourth-most popular social commerce platform in the U.S., according to a recent report by Capital One, with Americans spending about $32 million per day on TikTok. In 2024, the number of shoppers on TikTok rose 34.2% year-over-year, with projections showing a 5.91% annual increase through 2027.

Last month, the company stated that it is currently home to over 7.5 million businesses in the U.S., 74% of which have reported that the platform “helped them scale operations, hire new employees, and reach wider audiences.”

But while TikTok Shop is still miles behind Douyin, which reported almost $500 million in sales last year, TikTok has likely decided that it is established enough to begin building out its revenue intake from ad buys.

TikTok ended its free shipping subsidies last week.

However, TikTok employees have stated that a brand operating in a market where TikTok Shop recently launched -- such as Mexico, Brazil and a handful of European countries -- may amass more views without buying ads.

“My recommendation to all brands is to model your business to be sustainable on an ad-driven marketplace or you're destined to falter,” Max Benator, CEO of the social-commerce agency Orca, informed Business Insider. “Whether that's because you benefited from early traffic or a viral moment, you can't sustain it without an ad program, which costs money.”