Why big-box names on TikTok Shop squeeze the indie sellers who built it

If you run a small brand that got early on TikTok Shop, this is the holiday season the moat disappears. Modern Retail's Brands Briefing reports that 2026 will be the first holiday on TikTok Shop for Best Buy, Ulta Beauty and Sephora, three of the biggest names in their categories. The platform frames that as more choice for shoppers. For the indie sellers who built the storefront's reputation, it reads differently: the thing that made them discoverable, being one of the few recognizable brands in a young marketplace, is about to stop being rare.

The early-mover advantage is cashing out

Look at who TikTok Shop keeps putting forward. Beachwaver was one of the first U.S. sellers and moved more than 1.1 million units in a single year. E.l.f. and Tarte joined in 2023, and Tarte alone has sold 8.6 million units since. Those numbers came partly from product and creators, but partly from timing. There were only so many brands a shopper could buy from, so each one captured a larger slice of attention.

That math changes when a Sephora or an Ulta shows up. Those retailers arrive with their own brand recognition, their own creator relationships and marketing budgets that dwarf most of the sellers already on the platform. A shopper deciding where to buy a gift now has the big names they already trust sitting in the same feed as the indie brand they discovered through a video. The native sellers do not lose their audience overnight, but they lose the structural edge of scarcity.

How the smaller players are defending turf

The tactics in Modern Retail's reporting look like responses to exactly this pressure, whether or not the brands frame them that way. Beachwaver is launching a TikTok Shop-exclusive curling iron with a teenage creator, packaged to mimic a PR unboxing so buyers film their own content. E.l.f. and Tarte are leaning on advent calendars and limited editions rather than discounts, treating the platform as a place for surprise rather than price cuts. E.l.f.'s digital commerce lead told Modern Retail the focus is discovery and limited editions over promotions.

That is a reasonable play, because exclusivity is one of the few things a legacy retailer cannot copy instantly. A Sephora can match a price; it cannot easily replicate a product you can only get from one brand through one creator. The risk is that exclusive SKUs and daily livestreams are expensive to produce. The brands with the resources to run 760,000-plus live sessions across the platform, as sellers did over last year's Black Friday weekend, are the ones most able to keep up, which pushes the advantage back toward whoever has budget.

The honest limit

None of this means small sellers get pushed off. TikTok Shop is three years old in the U.S. and still growing into new categories, so there is more total demand to split, not a fixed pie. Nex Playground, which joined only in summer 2025, says 20,000 creators made content about it last quarter, so newcomers can still break out. The real question is distribution of winnings. If the platform's top sellers next January are dominated by names that were already dominant offline, TikTok Shop will have become another channel where incumbents win, rather than the place where an unknown curling-iron brand could outsell them. That shift, not the raw holiday sales figure, is what sellers should be watching.