Would You Buy an Electric Shaver on TikTok?

We interrupt your regularly-scheduled Recommends programming to bring you news of a breaking development in the world of online shopping: TikTok, the short-form video app as beloved by teens as it is derided by their parents, is making it a whole lot easier to buy while you scroll.

TikTok has operated as vehicle for brand discovery since its inception. But the nascent days of the platform’s TikTok Shop often felt like browsing the world’s weirdest flea market, a cacophonous mishmash of nifty-seeming kitchen hacks, Christmas lights for your car, and custom T-shirts with your dog’s face printed on them. The environment was reliably overstimulating, explains GQ associate social media manager Trishna Rikhy, and the products foisted upon her by the algorithm were reliably weird.

The frenetic churn of TikTok’s proprietary For You Page makes for good entertainment, but it’s not a great formula for surfacing the stuff you want, when you want it. Discounts abound, but they’re far from compelling. “It’s always useless shit that I would never need,” Rikhy says.

Her experience isn’t an anomaly—but soon enough, it might be. Earlier this month, the TikTok Shop unveiled a slew of new vendors at least partially enlisted to bolster its credibility in the e-comm space. Among them are names like Philips, Samsung, and Zwilling, powerhouse brands you might recognize and gravitate towards at your local Walmart, or on Amazon, the Goliath looming over TikTok’s still David-like shop. As of a few weeks ago, you can buy a Wahl clipper or a Gap sweatshirt directly through each brand’s respective TikTok storefront, with the same frictionless ease long since mastered by the competition.

Familiarity—plus a certain degree of widespread name recognition—seems to be kind of the point. In an informal poll of GQ staffers, few had experience buying anything directly via the app, and the ones who did chalked up their purchases to spur-of-the-moment decisions.

For plenty of TikTok’s users, buying an economy-size box of Scrub Daddies on a whim is part of the appeal; whether those users will head to the app first when they need a portable speaker or a QLED TV is another question entirely. We’d tell you to watch this space, but if your screen time reports look anything like ours, you don’t need the reminder.