Six months ago, Ulta Beauty became the first major US beauty retailer to open an official TikTok Shop storefront. In September, Sephora followed suit. The latest retailer to succumb to TikTok Shop's pull? Boots.
On September 28, the UK beauty and pharmacy retailer launched its first TikTok Shop storefront, initially stocking a curated assortment from No7’s Pro Artist, Good Intent, and Prime Forever collections. More Boots brands and products will follow in the coming months, while the launch itself will be accompanied by a No7 Live shopping event and exclusive offers.
Retailers joining TikTok Shop are reshaping beauty’s retail model. Until recently, TikTok was more likely to be seen as a place where beauty products went viral than as a place where established retailers sold them. But that distinction is quickly blurring.
TikTok says Live shopping sales have already increased 55% year over year in 2026, while beauty became one of TikTok Shop UK’s strongest and fastest-growing categories. In the US, beauty generated $2.7 billion on TikTok Shop in 2025, according to Charm.io, while more than a billion beauty-related searches occur on TikTok each month.
For retailers, that creates a relatively straightforward problem. TikTok increasingly influences what consumers want, which brands they discover, and, through TikTok Shop, where they can complete the transaction. Waiting for a viral product to send shoppers back to a retailer’s website or store means surrendering an increasingly valuable part of the purchase journey.
Paula Bobbett, Chief Digital and Data Officer at Boots, addressed this pain point in a statement, calling Boots’ onboarding to TikTok Shop “an important step in creating a more connected Boots shopping experience.” Bobbett believes that the move will “bring inspiration and purchase closer together.”
But while Ulta Beauty, Sephora, and Boots have reached the same conclusion that TikTok Shop warrants a place within their retail ecosystems, the way each is approaching the platform reveals three quite different ideas of what social commerce should do for a beauty retailer.
Ulta Beauty made the first move in March, launching an official TikTok Shop storefront with 18 brands and more than 30 bundles. Its strategy has since expanded to include exclusive bundles, early-access launches, and what President and CEO Kecia Steelman has described as “first moments” with brand partners. The objective isn’t confined to sales made within TikTok. On Ulta Beauty’s first-quarter earnings call, Steelman said the retailer was already seeing a “halo impact” in its stores from the TikTok business. At the time, Ulta Beauty told BeautyMatter that one of its primary objectives was to acquire new-to-Ulta-Beauty shoppers and bring them into its broader ecosystem.
Data from the e-commerce company Iced Media provides a clearer picture of what that strategy looks like in practice. In a snapshot of TikTok Shop activity shared with BeautyMatter, the agency identified approximately 2,800 Ulta Beauty affiliates generating sales, with its nine largest affiliates accounting for only around 24% of affiliate gross merchandise value (GMV). The relatively distributed sales base suggests Ulta is not dependent on a small group of creators or individual viral moments to generate transactions.
Instead, the retailer is building something closer to an always-on creator distribution network. A large affiliate base gives more products and brands opportunities to surface across consumers’ feeds, potentially making Ulta Beauty itself—not simply whichever product happens to be viral—a habitual destination for beauty discovery and purchase on TikTok.
“[Joining TikTok Shop] strengthens our role as the partner of choice for brands—adding another powerful tool in our brand-building playbook and giving them new, creator-powered ways to launch, tell their stories, scale with us, and globalize,” Lauren Brindley, Chief Merchandising and Digital Officer at Ulta Beauty, said in a statement announcing the launch.
Sephora has a different approach. Rather than building a TikTok Shop primarily around an always-on assortment, the retailer launched Sephora Drop Shop in the US on September 19 as a recurring product-launch franchise. Each month, one partner brand receives a dedicated drop involving teaser content, creators, interactive experiences, and a TikTok Live featuring a celebrity host, founders, and creators. Products debut exclusively on Sephora’s TikTok Shop before selected items expand to Sephora’s online and physical stores or to other retail partners.
“Beauty discovery has always been core to Sephora’s ethos, and the rise of social commerce and digital marketplaces has reinforced the need to evolve how we engage with our beauty lovers,” said Artemis Patrick, President and CEO of Sephora North America, in a press release. Patrick described the pilot as a “natural progression” in Sephora’s approach to beauty retail.
Early data suggests Sephora is building almost the inverse creator model. Iced Media identified 276 active affiliates around Sephora’s early TikTok Shop activity, with those creators posting approximately twice as many videos per affiliate as Ulta Beauty’s network. Sales were also considerably more concentrated; just nine creators accounted for approximately 80% of affiliate sales.
Rather than activating thousands of affiliates across a broad assortment, Sephora can concentrate creator output around fewer products during narrow launch windows, attempting to generate enough conversation and urgency to turn individual releases into events.
There are also early indications that the format can accommodate prestige price points. According to Iced Media, Sephora’s $250 Point of View Holiday Vault generated more than $50,000 in estimated sales during its first few days on TikTok Shop. While a single launch is too limited to establish broader demand for luxury-priced products on the platform, it suggests that creator-led demonstrations can drive purchases well above the lower-priced impulse buys historically associated with social commerce.
Where Ulta appears to be using TikTok Shop to widen its customer funnel, Sephora is positioning it as a new piece of launch infrastructure. Boots, meanwhile, is starting much closer to home. Its September 28 pilot will initially consist of only No7 products rather than the hundreds of third-party beauty brands found across Boots stores and online.
TikTok Shop will be another distribution channel for Boots’ beauty portfolio before it becomes a marketplace for the wider Boots beauty proposition. The retailer has already indicated that further brands and products will follow. Boots is not entirely new to navigating the relationship between TikTok-native beauty and traditional retail. The retailer brought Made by Mitchell—which built much of its early momentum through TikTok and TikTok Shop—into 95 Boots stores and online in 2024. In May, it became the first high street retail partner for P.Louise, launching more than 200 products across 36 stores and online, including six Boots exclusives.
How quickly Boots expands its TikTok Shop assortment, and whether that expansion extends substantially into third-party beauty, will determine whether it ultimately moves closer to Ulta Beauty’s broader storefront model or develops something distinct.
Historically, landing on the shelves of a major beauty retailer offered distribution, foot traffic, credibility, and access to an existing customer base. Sephora can offer a brand a launch involving creators, livestreaming, exclusivity, content, and checkout. Ulta Beauty can combine exclusive products with TikTok discovery and then potentially move those consumers into its wider retail ecosystem. Boots can bring the credibility of an established high-street retailer to a marketplace where trust and authenticity are increasingly valued.
For brands, that creates another consideration when negotiating retail partnerships. The question is no longer simply which retailer can provide the most doors or strongest e-commerce placement, but which can generate attention around a product and convert it. Retail competition that once played out through store-exclusive brands and products is beginning to migrate into the social-commerce feed.
Many beauty companies have spent the past several years building direct storefronts, affiliate networks, creator relationships, and Live operations on TikTok. As their retail partners move onto the same platforms, brands potentially gain another source of amplification but also another seller competing for the same TikTok consumer.
Front Row sees the current emphasis on exclusivity as important to creating incremental demand. Sephora and Ulta have both leaned into products, bundles, or launch windows that consumers cannot access through brands’ existing TikTok Shop storefronts, giving retailers something distinct to sell rather than simply duplicating existing assortment.
“Retailers like Sephora and Ulta are approaching TikTok Shop through ‘drop culture’—exclusive products that can't be purchased anywhere else—which is a smart play that creates incremental reach rather than pure redistribution,” Front Row’s Senior Director of Social & Partnerships Danielle Acosta told BeautyMatter.
Operating successfully on TikTok Shop requires investment across fulfillment, platform operations, affiliate commissions, creator seeding, and content. Acota argues that multibrand retailers can absorb some of that burden while giving brands access to established creator networks and consumer trust; for smaller brands in particular, retailer participation could therefore route onto TikTok Shop without having to replicate the scale of operation required to compete independently.
There is a margin trade-off. Acosta said brands selling through a retailer on TikTok Shop are likely to make less on each unit through their own storefront because they absorb retailer margins on top of the platform and affiliate costs. But that calculation changes if the retailer generates sales or acquires customers the brand would not otherwise have reached. “Less profitable per sale doesn’t necessarily mean less profitable overall, she said. Acosta cautioned that there is not yet enough evidence from brands selling the same SKUs through both routes to determine how economics compare at scale.
If the same SKU is available through a brand, Sephora, Ulta Beauty, or another retail partner within the same marketplace, decisions that were previously spread across different channels begin colliding inside a single feed. Acosta says brands will need clearer rules around promotional windows, affiliate commissions, inventory allocation, and attribution to prevent one storefront from undercutting another.
TikTok has substantial control over which products consumers encounter first. Beauty is the platform’s most-searched category. Its UK beauty business grew 60% in 2025, and TikTok Shop has become the country’s fourth-largest beauty retailer.
Discovery, demonstration, recommendation, creator endorsement, and checkout can now occur without consumers having to reach the retailer’s digital property. Joining the platform allows retailers to capture more of that journey, but it also means operating in somebody else’s territory. TikTok controls the feed, recommendation engine, creator ecosystem, and much of the consumer attention surrounding the transaction.
For Ulta Beauty, Sephora, and now Boots, the calculation appears to be that being present at the point of discovery outweighs that trade-off. The retailers’ approaches also suggest that TikTok Shop is unlikely to become simply another digital shelf. Ulta Beauty is treating it as an acquisition and assortment opportunity. Sephora is turning TikTok into a launch vehicle. Boots is using owned beauty to test how a 177-year-old retailer can participate in creator-led commerce.
The strategies differ, but the direction of travel does not. TikTok spent years proving it could make beauty products sell out elsewhere. Now, some of beauty’s biggest retailers are betting that the next sale should happen there.
