Sephora’s Making Monthly Drops on TikTok Shop | Fast Five Shorts

Sephora is set to launch a pilot storefront on TikTok shop later this month, featuring exclusive monthly product drops built around livestream shopping events.

According to Chain Storage, Sephora will begin piloting a Sephora Drop shop storefront on TikTok shop in the US starting Saturday, September 19, offering exclusive monthly drops curated from Sephora brand partners.

Producer Ella will crack up in the background knowing that TikTok shop is the hardest thing for me to say.

Every week on this podcast, each drop will include teasers, interactive experience and creator led content building to an official TikTok live shopping event featuring a celebrity host, brand founders and creators unveiling products in real time.

Sephora has partnered with TikTok since 2023 through the Sephora and TikTok Incubator Program and has continued layering on digital and social commerce bets including My Sephora Storefront which is an influencer affiliate program that launched in fall of 2025 and a pilot inside ChatGPT that began in March of 2026.

Shelley why do you think brands are so much more open to experimenting with TikTok shop as opposed to Amazon?

Is it because it's a social media platform?

Is it the live shopping element?

Because both at the end of the day are marketplaces, are they not?

They are technically both marketplaces, but I would argue incredibly different marketplaces.

Amazon captures demand whereas TikTok can actually create it.

And so this is why I love this.

And I think there's something even bigger happening here than social commerce.

My prediction is the next generation of great brands won't just have customers, they'll have communities.

And TikTok is amazing at creating communities.

Consumers actually have dialogue, interact in chats, get to know the creators, learn about products, and those are all things that are so powerful, particularly in beauty.

And TikTok has always over indexed in beauty so people aren't just scrolling past an ad, they're actually engaging.

And I think that that's what is really powerful and I think Sephora is going to learn a ton from consumers as they start doing this.

Sephora actually just putting on a show here that happens to have a buy button which is quite different than how you would engage, you know, with an experience on Amazon.

And so I think that again this is going to be a lesson in demand generation.

I think that brands that aren't investing in community building are not going to have the outsized growth that brands that are investing in community building.

And so I think that this is just a really great example of the future of brand building and potentially the future of, of, you know, the beauty category and how folks are engaging with it.

Who shots fired on that one.

Wow, that was so great.

I 100% agree with you again.

I mean I started saying about God 10 years ago when I started talk like I think we're going to see a world where the influencers are the new merchants, quote, unquote.

And that's, that's kind of what you're getting at here in the online space.

Like the influencers are going to be the merchants, particularly with marketplaces as prevalent as they are and the access to products that they, they, that those influencers have to then promote and get behind.

Right.

Build a community around.

So like TikTok shop enables that.

You're 100% right too.

Shelley.

Like to answer my question too, it's, it's all of the above because one begets the other like it's the social media hook.

That's why people are spending hours on hours on TikTok.

They're seeking inspiration.

They're doom scrolling Amazon's Amazon people go there because they, they want to buy something, not because they want to be entertained.

So net net, this is the other point I was thinking about in this headline too.

I would expect the conversion on seeing items for the very first time to be astronomically higher on TikTok shop than it ever would be on Amazon.

Like how many times have you ever seen something for, how many times are you even ever seeing something for the first time on Amazon?

I don't think, I don't think that's ever happened in the history of my, my purchasing something on Amazon.

You know, like I'm looking for the category in and of itself when I start on Amazon.

So I, I, so I think that's inherently what's here.

And yeah, to your point, Shelly, that has ripple effects downstream.

Well, I think what you just said is, is the really important point here is that you go to Amazon to search for something.

You're not going there to be inspired or learn something.

And that's where TikTok actually, and communities actually really help if I want to be inspired or learn about the latest thing or the latest application of something.

I go on TikTok because I'm going to, you know, be around a bunch of other people that are inspiring me and teaching me.

And that's just not the platform that Amazon is.

Yeah.

And meanwhile Amazon will do okay because they'll be fulfilling the orders on the back end for all these TikTok shop brands anyway.

So who knows?

But yeah, but it's great.

It's, it's, it's the first example we have of someone actually closing the line of social commerce to marketplace commerce.

Right?

That TikTok shop can own that relationship end to end.

And the question now will become, how do the, how do the chat GPTs of the world, the AI engines of the world, come and insert themselves into that line?

Because, you know, that, that, that idea didn't exist two or three years ago, but now that's a palpable thing that these companies have to think about.