TikTok Shop Grows to New EU Merchant Countries

TikTok Shop opened its doors to shoppers and sellers in Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Poland on June 15. TikTok’s move says a lot about where the platform thinks e-commerce is headed. As marketers, it’s important to place ourselves in the right places at the right time to benefit from these signals early on. 

TikTok’s expansion also lands at the exact moment search behaviour itself is shifting away from Google and toward platforms like TikTok.  

Let’s break down what this update means for marketers.

Which EU countries did TikTok Shop expand to in 2026?

Starting June 15, users in Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Poland can buy and sell directly inside TikTok through shoppable videos and live shopping streams, without ever leaving the app. 

TikTok frames this as removing friction from a process that’s traditionally search-first, i.e.,

• Type a query 
• Click through 
• Compare
• Finally, Buy.

 TikTok Shop collapses that into one continuous scroll.

Source: TikTok

Since launching in the EU in late 2024, TikTok Shop has signed up more than 100,000 European sellers. That seller base has driven triple-digit growth in daily Gross Merchandise Value between August 2025 and February 2026.

Sellers already on TikTok Shop also get a meaningful upgrade through the platform’s “Sell Across Europe” feature. Once a business launches in its home market, it can scale into other EU countries where TikTok Shop operates, localising product listings and shipping through TikTok-partnered logistics providers or approved carriers. 

Pair all that with an expanded creator affiliate network, i.e., letting EU-approved creators promote products and earn commission across borders, and you’ve got the infrastructure for pan-European influencer commerce that didn’t exist eighteen months ago.

Social Search Behaviour Makes This Expansion More Than Just Geographic Growth

As of late, search itself is moving. People aren’t opening Google when they want a product recommendation, a skincare routine, or a restaurant suggestion; they’re opening TikTok. Industry research puts Gen Z’s use of TikTok as a search tool at 62%, beating traditional search engines for everyday queries.

TikTok’s own data backs this up directly: 93% of daily TikTok users say they use the platform as a research tool before they buy something. The platform is where the buying journey starts, and now it’s also where it finishes it too, because of TikTok Shop integration.

If users are already discovering, evaluating, and trusting products through creator content on TikTok,  then building the checkout into that same scroll is the natural next step. TikTok isn’t bolting commerce onto a content platform. It’s closing a loop that social search behaviour already opened.

Source: TikTok 

The numbers in the UK further prove our point. 31% of online shoppers there now buy directly on TikTok, and one in seven shoppers in Germany has made a TikTok purchase. Those numbers are indicative of mainstream behaviour, built on a foundation of social-first discovery rather than search-engine queries.

House of Marketers’ Insights: What This Means for Brands and Marketers

If your brand sells into Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, or Poland, or if you’re a marketing agency managing clients who do, there’s a genuine first-mover window here. Markets the size of these four don’t open often, and the sellers and creators who establish category presence early typically hold an advantage that’s hard to dislodge once a market matures.

A few things worth acting on now:

Map creator partnerships in these markets before competitors do. 

The expanded affiliate network means creators in these four countries can start earning commission on product promotion immediately. Early creator relationships compound because the ones who build category authority now become the ones algorithms favour later.

Treat TikTok Shop content as social-search content, not just sales content. 

Given how much buying behaviour now starts with discovery on the platform, product content needs to answer the question a user hasn’t typed yet. Curate content around seeding product interest in everyday contexts.

Use “Sell Across Europe” to think regionally, not just locally. 

Brands already live in France, Germany, Italy, Spain or Ireland can extend into these new four markets without rebuilding logistics from scratch. That’s a meaningfully lower barrier to EU-wide expansion than most retail channels offer.

Conclusion

TikTok isn’t just adding checkout buttons on its app for four new countries. It’s extending a commerce model built for a world where discovery, evaluation, and purchase happen in the same scroll. Because that’s how people search, full stop. Brands that treat this as a geographic footnote will miss the larger shift. The ones who treat it as another entry point into how their customers actually search and buy today will be the ones with creator relationships and category presence already locked in by the time everyone else catches up.

At House of Marketers, we help brands design and execute influencer marketing strategies built for this shift. We can help you design and run campaigns that work across the full discovery journey. From creator selection to content structuring and paid media boosting, our focus is on long-term performance. So partner with House of Marketers today!