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The top 10 brands on TikTok Shop in Europe, country by country

Adrian Gmelch — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 22:00:00 GMT

Five national rankings from the past six months point to two ways of winning on TikTok Shop, a short list of brands that cross borders, and a British market that's either everyone's future or a different animal altogether.

Over the past six months, medicube sold more on TikTok Shop in Britain than the whole of France's top ten did combined. One Korean skincare brand, €32.6 million in sales, against ten French names put together. And France isn't the exception. The same gap shows up almost everywhere across Europe's five biggest TikTok Shop markets. Britain is out on its own, years ahead. Germany, France, Italy and Spain are younger, smaller, and still working out what kind of market each of them wants to be.

The rankings below come from Kalodata and cover the ten biggest brands by TikTok Shop GMV in the UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy over the past 180 days or so (4 March to 30 August 2026). Keep one thing in mind as you read: this is brand-level data, not shop-level, and that changes what several of these numbers mean.

Whatnot vs. TikTok Shop: two different bets on live commerce

Adrian Gmelch — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 22:00:00 GMT

Whatnot just closed a $545 million round at a $20 billion valuation, doubling its worth in ten months. TikTok Shop generated more merchandise value in the first half of 2026 alone than Whatnot has processed in its entire history. Live commerce has clearly found its footing in the West, after a decade of false starts. But these two winners are not fighting the same war, and merchants who treat them as interchangeable will misread both.

MCP: the protocol every AI shopping agent (now) depends on

Adrian Gmelch — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 22:00:00 GMT

In November 2024, Anthropic published a technical specification with a name only an engineer could love: the Model Context Protocol (MCP). There was no keynote, no retail partner on stage, no promise to reinvent shopping. Twenty months later, it sits underneath virtually every AI commerce initiative on the market. When Google unveiled its Universal Commerce Protocol at NRF, MCP was one of the three protocols it orchestrates. When Shopify made 5.6 million stores "agent-ready by default," it did so by shipping MCP servers to every storefront. When an AI agent checks a price, reads a returns policy, or verifies stock before recommending a product, the odds are it is speaking MCP.

The protocols that promised to transform e-commerce made headlines. The protocol that actually connected AI to e-commerce barely made a press release. This article explains what MCP is, how it works, how it differs from UCP, ACP and the rest of the acronym stack, where adoption really stands in mid-2026, and what it changes for retailers.

Google AI Shopping: Will this attempt finally work?

Adrian Gmelch — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 22:00:00 GMT

Froogle, Checkout, Express, Buy on Google: Google's commerce graveyard is well populated. Now, with UCP, agentic checkout and a billion AI Mode users, the company is making its most serious attempt yet. A look at why this one could finally work, and why history says to wait for the numbers.

GEO for brands: how to get found in LLMs?

Alexis Merelle — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 22:00:00 GMT

A growing share of product research no longer starts with a search bar. It starts with a question typed into ChatGPT, a follow up in Perplexity, or an AI Overview that answers the query before a single blue link appears. For brands that spent fifteen years learning how to rank, this is a new game with new rules, and it has a name: Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO.

The premise is simple to state and harder to execute. Search engines used to rank pages in a list and let the shopper choose. Generative engines synthesize an answer and choose for them, citing only a handful of sources along the way. Being page one on Google no longer guarantees a mention when someone asks an AI assistant to recommend the best product for their situation, and that gap between ranking and being recommended is exactly what GEO tries to close.

TikTok Shop Europe, Q2 2026: €500m across four markets

Adrian Gmelch — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 22:00:00 GMT

France, Germany, Spain and Italy generated €498,779,919 on TikTok Shop in the ninety days to 9 July 2026, a window that covers most of the second quarter. That figure comes from Kalodata's estimated data for the four markets.*

The number itself is the least interesting thing about it. What matters is where it came from. Affiliated creators account for 69.9% of it. The Shopping Mall tab, the surface inside TikTok that behaves most like a conventional marketplace, where a shopper searches and browses, accounts for only 15.3%.

A retailer who plugs in a catalogue and waits will capture roughly one euro in six.

ChatGPT Ads are coming to Europe

Adrian Gmelch — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 22:00:00 GMT

ChatGPT is about to start showing ads to users in France, Germany and Ireland. OpenAI hasn't confirmed a launch date, but it didn't need to: the plan is already sitting in a stack of job postings, and the numbers behind it point straight at Europe's three biggest ad markets.

ChatGPT Ads: first results are in

Adrian Gmelch — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 22:00:00 GMT

One number sets the scene. According to data from Adobe Analytics published this week, shoppers who reached retail sites via an AI chatbot during the four days of Prime Day 2026 in the US were 40% more likely to complete a purchase than those coming from search, email or social media. A first in the event's history.

And Amazon, of all companies, bought sponsored placements in ChatGPT to promote this Prime Day. The same Amazon that has been blocking ChatGPT's crawlers for months, that sued Perplexity for shopping on behalf of its users without authorization, and whose share of agentic traffic remains the lowest in the industry, around 0.4% according to J.P. Morgan. The e-commerce giant is playing both sides at once: it pays to be seen, and refuses to be read.

AI and luxury: customers are one step ahead of brands

Alexis Merelle — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 22:00:00 GMT

Luxury has always moved at its own pace, that of long-term thinking and controlled craftsmanship. Faced with artificial intelligence, this pace is clashing for the first time with that of its own customers, which is far faster. This is the finding of the study “Winning Over the Customer in the Age of AI”, conducted by Bain & Company for the Comité Colbert among 23 luxury houses and groups, and supplemented by a consumer survey in three countries. The industry is still watching, while its buyers have already made the shift.

Lengow now supports Google AI Commerce

Alexis Merelle — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 22:00:00 GMT

The future of e-commerce is about being present wherever your customers are searching, browsing, and shopping. Today, we're excited to announce that Lengow now supports Google AI Commerce, opening up a new discoverability and checkout layer for merchants across Google's AI-powered surfaces, such as AI Mode and the Gemini app.