TikTok Shop & StockX Enter Auction Arena In Bid To Take Collectibles Market Share From eBay
TikTok and StockX introduce auction offerings in bid to take market share from eBay in key collectibles categories.
TikTok Shop launched "Countdown Bidding" earlier this year, aiming to replicate auction functionality from other popular livestream shopping platforms like Whatnot and eBay Live.
Now just ~5 months in, TikTok is moving quickly to respond to user feedback, with new improvements rolling out for auctions including Temporary Listings for easier order management and fulfillment as well as updates to extended bidding timers.
Global Ecommerce Cross Border Trade Operations Lead, Steve Halupka, thanked the teams responsible for getting these new features into the hands of buyers and sellers in a recent post on LinkedIn.
Halupka led many of eBay's collectibles and trading card initiatives from 2014-2022, when he left to join TikTok parent company ByteDance.
Liz Morton
Since then, eBay has struggled to maintain consistent leadership for the collectibles categories, with a revolving door of managers either moving on to other internal positions or leaving for competing marketplaces like Alt and Walmart.
Liz Morton
While it's still early days for TikTok auctions, GM Collectibles Owen Liang says he believes TikTok's superpower is discovery and their massive monthly user-base and that as those users learn and become more comfortable with the auction format, TikTok could have a significant opportunity to tap into high-end collectibles.
...TikTok’s superpower is discovery. Every month, over 20 million users watch collectibles content on TikTok. Many of them have never joined an auction before, but when we educate them through pre-live short videos, explain how auctions work, and start from $1, we see new buyers coming in and converting fast.
And for high-ticket items — yes, it’s possible too. Every breaker has a core community, and within that community are loyal collectors willing to go big. When you plan ahead, invite them to your auction streams, and drive strong engagement early, the algorithm does the rest, amplifying your reach and accelerating sales.
The move into auctions and to take a larger piece of the high-end collectibles market comes as reports are swirling that TikTok Shop has grown to almost the size of eBay in just ~2 short years versus eBay's 30 year tenure.
TikTok doesn’t disclose aggregate sales figures, but the price and sales volume of individual products are visible on the app.
Based on that data, analytics firm EchoTik estimates TikTok Shop sold ~$19 Billion worth of products globally from July through September of this year, with the US accounting for ~$4 Billion to ~$4.5 Billion of that total, an increase of about 125 percent compared to Q2 2025.
By comparison, eBay reported $20.1 Billion total global GMV for the same period, just barely managing to stay ahead of the social media giant despite devoting significant resources and discounts for users to try to boost usage of eBay Live livestream shopping.
Liz Morton
StockX
Meanwhile, another rival for key focus category market share has also entered the auction space as StockX launches a premium bidding experience for the world’s most sought-after sneakers, pop-culture memorabilia and collectibles.
“Our community has consistently shown a passion for unique, hard-to-find items, so StockX Auctions is a natural evolution for us,” said Greg Schwartz, StockX CEO. “This new experience creates a trusted, transparent, and genuinely exciting space where collectors can access items they’ve only dreamed of. By combining our verification expertise with real-time bidding, we’re expanding what it means to invest in culture.”
There's no doubt that StockX's auction aspirations can be traced back to former CEO Scott Cutler, who stepped down from the company last year.
Liz Morton
Cutler previously served as President of eBay's StubHub subsidiary in 2015 before being promoted to VP eBay Americas in 2017. He then left in February 2019 only to "suddenly" take on the CEO job at rival StockX a few months later, taking a chunk of eBay's sneaker business with him in the process.
While StockX played it off at the time that they had "poached" Cutler from eBay, the reality appeared to be that then eBay CEO Devin Wenig allowed Cutler to engage/consult with StockX while still a company officer.
In fact, both StockX co-founder Josh Luber and Cutler publicly gushed to media at the time about their long friendship since the site was launched in 2016 and that Cutler had been a "trusted advisor" since the beginning.
Grace Turner
“Scott and I met just two days after StockX went live,” says Luber. “His extraordinary background mirrors the unique business model we have built at StockX. He understood the power of a stock market of things and quickly became a friend and trusted advisor.
Over the three years that followed, as the business scaled rapidly, Greg (Schwartz, StockX co-founder and COO) and I had the idea that Scott might one day be the perfect CEO to take us to the next level. Then the stars aligned – the growth continued, we added three world-class investors to our team, and Scott became available. We weren’t looking for a new CEO, but this was a no-brainer.”...
...“I have known the company and the management team since the beginning and have been impressed by its unique market model in e-commerce and dramatic growth. StockX is revolutionizing e-commerce,” says Cutler.
As savvy scrutineer unsuckEBAY put it at the time, StockX's claims about the situation were more than a little misleading.
Given those auspicious beginnings, it was a fitting full circle moment that one of Cutler's parting gifts for StockX was brokering a partnership with another ex-eBay alum to help Walmart fast track their foray into the pre-owned sneaker space in 2024, which recently expanded to also include the latest collectible fad, Labubus.
Liz Morton
Unfortunately, it looks like StockX is learning the hard way why it's important to have trust and safety measures in place to verify users and bids and prevent fraud and/or trolling, which is apparently running rampant across the first batch of auctions launched on November 5th.
Let's check in and see how the new auctions are doing at StockX, and…
— Dylan Dittrich (@DylanDittrich) November 7, 2025
Great Scott!!
No, these 2011 Nike Mags are not worth $1,200,000.
At least there’s six days to clean this up. Don’t even need to fire up the Delorean. pic.twitter.com/a4dBR4SOhY
VP Product, Tim O'Malley, has been responding to users on X, saying they are handling the issue with a mix of tech and humans.
Appreciate you noticing, and yes, we’re handling with a mix of tech and humans. Like anything involving humans, it’s not exactly real-time but we’ll continue to improve it. The Mags are also cleaned up now.
— Tim O'Malley (@timomall) November 7, 2025
And while some users say they are doing a great job of catching the fraudulent bids, it's still not a great look that StockX apparently failed to plan for this entirely foreseeable problem and have proper systems in place to prevent the flood of embarrassing screenshots that are now proliferating across social media.
What do you think of TikTok Shop and StockX going up against eBay for auctions? Let us know in the comments below!
