TikTok Shop launched in Europe a little over a year ago.

The hype was real. And many brands jumped at it, wanting to be early in a new channel.

But almost everybody was left disappointed and abandoned it again.

But recently, the data from several of our brands gave me every reason to look at the channel again.

I think you should too. Here's why:

If you tried TikTok Shop when it first launched in Europe, there is a good chance you were disappointed.

But looking at the data from the over 1,000 eCom brands on Klar, something has changed over the last few months.

We've started seeing brands generate hundreds of thousands of euros per month through TikTok Shop. In some cases, more than a million in a single month. For other brands, it already accounts for 20-30% of total revenue.

And honestly, it isn't that surprising that it took some time for the channel to take off.

TikTok Shop isn't just another acquisition channel. It's a completely new shopping behavior.

People had to get used to discovering a product, trusting it, and buying it without ever leaving TikTok. That doesn't happen in the first three months of a channel's existence. It takes time.

Last year, I spoke to the Head of TikTok Shop for Germany and asked him: how does the early traction in Europe compare to what you saw in the US?

The US is the real benchmark here. Not in absolute revenue, but the traction curve of the channel over time.

His answer was essentially: we're on par with where we expected to be, and with how the US developed.

Given that, the numbers we're seeing now make a lot of sense. The US went through the same slow start. Europe is simply further back on the same curve.

TikTok Shop never failed in Europe. It just needed time for customers to get used to it.

So if you shut it down a year ago, I think now is the time to look at it again.

Not because the channel changed. Because the customers did. Your old test measured an audience that didn't know how to buy inside TikTok yet. That data tells you nothing about the channel today.

And the brands already doing 20-30% of revenue through TikTok Shop share a pattern: impulse-friendly, demo-able products. If that describes your catalog, the window to build a position is now, while most of your competitors still think the channel is dead.

I'll go deeper into an interesting approach I have been reading about recently where brands leverage TikTok Shop to accelerate their core business 👇

TikTok Shop brought one thing back that had died down over the last few years, but every marketer loves.

Affiliates - people promoting you and only getting paid when they generate revenue.

In the past years, influencers and creators often got paid flat fees, so the risk was entirely on the brand when booking someone for the first time. With affiliates, this is not the case.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. The TikTok Shop strategy I keep reading has nothing to do with making money on TikTok Shop.

The goal instead is to solve one of the biggest problems eCom brands encounter - creative testing and creative volume.

Brands go extremely aggressive on the commission they offer affiliates. So aggressive that TikTok Shop becomes a roughly zero-margin business for them.

But that commission buys one very valuable thing: massive volume. Hundreds of creators start producing content for your product, each with their own hook, their own angle, their own way of selling it.

So they aren't optimizing TikTok Shop for margin. They are optimizing it for creative output.

This way, you're not buying revenue. You're buying a creative testing army.

Every affiliate video is a live test of a way to communicate and sell your product. With real audiences and real purchase data attached. At a scale no in-house creative team and no agency retainer could ever match.

And the winning approaches don't stay on TikTok.

Take the concepts that convert and either whitelist the creator's content directly or rebuild the winning angle as your own ads. Then run those across Meta and every other paid channel, where your full margin is intact.

So basically, you follow these three steps:

You make TikTok Shop break even. And the learnings generate money everywhere else.

Because your brand is not a silo, and not every channel has to be profitable by itself as long as it helps you to generate more total contribution margin and growth.