Americans Spend $7 Million Per Day on TikTok Shop. So Now What?

So in the end, there was no last-minute clemency granted by the U.S. Supreme Court to ByteDance, owner of TikTok.

Even after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied ByteDance’s appeal against a ruling that ByteDance either sell TikTok to a new owner not based in a “foreign adversarial country” or see it banned in the U.S., I think we all assumed there would be the continuation of a little more posturing, a little more political point-scoring, and then something would be worked out, to the joy of the roughly 150 million Americans who use it.

No such luck. Unless ByteDance complies with the ruling by selling TikTok in the next day and a half, something they said they won’t do, then the TikTok ban will take effect in the U.S. on Sunday, January 19. You won’t be able to download it or use it—legally, anyway.

Americans spent $67 billion shopping on social media in 2023. With TikTok the fourth most popular, a significant portion of that buying and selling was done through the app. TikTok Shop was only just launched in the U.S. in September 2023, which allowed users to buy directly through the app.

And now the question is, with Americans spending $7 million shopping through TikTok every day, how will people buy the junk peddled to them by influencers? About 33 million TikTok users—a little more than a fifth—bought through TikTok in 2023.

Significant numbers of TikTok users are fleeing the sinking TikTok ship for the dry decks of RedNote, an app similar to TikTok but not facing a ban. Few Americans had even heard of RedNote prior to this week. It stands to gain the abandoned TikTok shoppers, as it has e-commerce functionality built into it already.

But where does that lead? TikTok found itself in the American government’s crosshairs because, frankly, it’s a Chinese-owned app with a huge following among Americans and the capability of mobilizing large numbers of people.

Does TikTok have a too-cozy relationship with the Chinese government? Perhaps. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit digital rights group, has said in the past that within TikTok there is a “seed of genuine security concern,” even as it’s railed against the Supreme Court’s ban as unconstitutional.

But when the U.S. government itself is pressuring Apple to install backdoors into its iPhone, the NSA is listening to Americans’ phone calls on a widespread basis, and police departments nationwide were requisitioning the footage of unknowing owners of Ring doorbell cameras, isn’t there a whiff of hypocrisy? A Cold War took over most of the 20th century. Let’s not hurry into another one for the 21st.