“An impending change in the Brazilian e-commerce landscape?

TikTok’s offensive in the Brazilian market continues to escalate.

Following the launch of semi-closed-loop e-commerce Merchants internal testing in early 2024, www.tiktokdatatool.com’s newly released data for the first quarter of 2025 shows that TikTok topped the Brazilian apps list with more than 20 million downloads, edging out Temu, which had 19.8 million downloads, and Mektor, which had 12.1 million downloads.

Judging from this series of actions and the traffic advantage gained, TikTok Shop is pressing ahead with its e-commerce business to fully land in Brazil on top of its huge user base. With a huge user base and traffic advantage, TikTok Shop is accelerating the full landing of its e-commerce business in Brazil.

This is equivalent to adding fuel to the already hot competitive landscape of the Brazilian e-commerce market.

01

TikTok tops downloads in Brazil

A few days ago, www.tiktokdatatool.com published a list of the 15 most downloaded apps in Brazil in the first quarter of 2025, and the data shows that the competitive dynamics of the market are undergoing a remarkable change. In this latest list, short-form video giant TikTok managed to top the list with more than 20 million downloads, leapfrogging to become the most downloaded app by Brazilian users in the first quarter of the year.

Prior to TikTok’s rise to the top of the download charts, much of the market’s attention was focused on the meteoric rise of Temu, which began its Brazilian operations in May 2024 and officially launched in early June, and topped the Brazilian app download charts in August 2024, with a whopping 7.2 million downloads in the same month.

By January 2025, Temu’s monthly active users had soared to 39 million, successfully surpassing traditional e-commerce giant Mercado in terms of user scale, and advancing to the second largest e-commerce platform in Brazil.

However, in terms of the number of downloads of all apps in the first quarter, Temu ranked second with 19.8 million downloads, while Mercado Livre, which has long been at the center of the Brazilian e-commerce market, ranked third with 12.1 million downloads.

This latest download ranking is a visual reflection of TikTok’s growing user appeal in Brazil, and a sign that the traffic entrance of the Brazilian mobile Internet and even e-commerce market is changing.

As a matter of fact, TikTok has been “coveting” the Brazilian e-commerce market for more than a day. As early as before Temu officially entered the Brazilian market, that is, in 2023, TikTok Shop announced plans to enter the Brazilian market. Since then, TikTok has been actively promoting the relevant preparatory work, including a large number of e-commerce related jobs in Sao Paulo, to pave the way for the establishment of a localized operations team and infrastructure.

Despite the early announcement, TikTok has appeared to be more cautious in terms of actual e-commerce functionality going live. It wasn’t until early 2024 that TikTok launched a small, semi-closed-loop e-commerce solicitation with invitation-only internal testing in Brazil.

In March 2025, New Consumer Daily reported that TikTok Shop, the platform’s built-in shopping feature, had begun to reach out to Chinese sellers, inviting them to move into the new marketplace and open online stores. TikTok Shop is expected to officially launch in Brazil in April, according to Brazil-related media sources.

In recent years, TikTok has accelerated its expansion in the global market, and up to now, TikTok Shop’s e-commerce business has formed a layout in a number of key regions around the world, covering Southeast Asia (e.g., Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore), Europe and the US (e.g., the United Kingdom, the United States), as well as Saudi Arabia, Mexico and other countries.

Especially in the last six months, with the fermentation of the tariff storm, TikTok Shop has pressed the fast-forward button in the European market, following the opening of the Spanish and Irish sites, and then quickly landing in Germany, France and Italy and other major countries site, to further weave the European e-commerce network.

At the same time, in order to enhance the localization service ability, TikTok also launched Fulfillment by TikTok (FBT) such as official logistics services in the UK, Germany and Spain and other markets.

Looking to Asia, in addition to its progress in Southeast Asia, TikTok Shop’s next key target markets include the highly mature Japan, which is scheduled to go live in June 2025, aiming to capitalize on the local environment for business growth.

02

Will TikTok Shop stir up the Brazilian market?

In Brazil, TikTok can realize the download volume on the “top”, and its huge Internet user base in the country is inseparable.

As of the beginning of 2024, Brazil has about 187.9 million Internet users, of which the data released by ByteDance Advertising Resources shows that, as of the end of 2024, the number of TikTok users over the age of 18 has exceeded 111.3 million, and this large group of Internet users provides strong support for TikTok to bring sustained growth in downloads and active users.

Looking at the e-commerce landscape in Brazil, traditional e-commerce platform Mercado Livre has long dominated the market with its well-established local ecosystem, but faces strong challenges from international platforms such as Shopee and AliExpress.

According to a March 2025 report by Thunderbird.com, the Brazilian e-commerce market currently shows a three-pronged approach, with Mercado sitting at the top with a market share of 13.6%, Shopee improving from 6.6% to 10.88% to overtake Amazon in second place, and Amazon in third place with a market share of about 7-8%. Further down the rankings are platforms such as SHEIN, Temu and Speedtrade in that order.

Shopee has grown rapidly in Brazil in recent years and now has an average daily order volume of 3 million. Its success is mainly due to two strategies: first, it insists on the low price strategy, and has established the cognition of “buy imitation brands on Shopee” in the mind of consumers; second, it emphasizes on logistics fulfillment, and launches the policy of “20.88% commission and free shipping” for merchants, which is more than Merkle in the last-mile delivery. In the last kilometer distribution than the United States customers have more advantages.

Although the emerging platform from the point of view of sales scale, Temu market share is less than the traditional platform, but from last year, Temu in the user acquisition and scale of the amazing growth, the number of monthly active users and even once surpassed the United States more than the market, the original market pattern constitutes a powerful impact, showing the great potential of latecomers.

Now, with TikTok Shop, which has a huge traffic advantage, about to make a full-scale push into the Brazilian e-commerce market, the competition has been pushed to a new white-hot stage.

The industry is most concerned about the impact of Brazilian TikTok Shop on Shopee. From the current development, Shopee not only ranks second in the Brazilian e-commerce market, but Brazil contributes about 10% of Shopee’s revenue.

TikTok has managed to top the latest app download list with its huge user base and strong content distribution capabilities, and its traffic advantage should not be underestimated.

Unlike traditional e-commerce that mainly relies on users’ active search or platform recommendations, the upcoming TikTok Shop, with its interest- and content-driven shopping model, is expected to efficiently convert the platform’s massive traffic, making it a challenger that cannot be ignored by existing e-commerce platforms, including Shopee.