Best practices for TikTok Shop

Last updated: September 2024

Start your marketing and sales efforts with these recommended steps after you create your TikTok Shop. You can directly create your TikTok Shop at TikTok Seller Center.

Note: TikTok Shop is now available in the following markets: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Vietnam.

  • Maximize the products uploaded to TikTok Shop (TTS). Do not only upload your bestselling products or products that you believe will sell well on TikTok Shop. We recommend that you upload all products available to help increase exposure among potential shoppers.

  • Maximize the number of Shoppable Video posts on your TikTok account. Do not only upload videos that have performed well on other platforms or that you believe will perform well on TikTok. Uploading videos on TikTok requires no additional costs. We recommend that you post as many videos as possible on your TikTok account to help increase exposure among potential shoppers.

  • Add TikTok Shop Product Link (the little orange cart) to all relevant videos on your TikTok account. While it is best practice to ensure the linked product matches the video content, it is more important to have a TikTok Shop Product Link on as many video posts as possible.

  • Participate in the open affiliate plan. You may participate in the targeted plan if you are already familiar with creators and have an existing creator pipeline. Note: If you have not set benchmarks before, we recommend starting with a 10% commission rate, and gradually reducing it to 5% or 1% as your TikTok Shop GMV grows.

  • Start with Video Shopping Ads (VSA) for TikTok Shop, prioritizing existing videos from your TikTok account that have already generated organic conversions (Spark Ads). Note: When you use an existing video as an asset for Video Shopping Ads, the Video Shopping Ads will use the products chosen during ad creation in the ad link. You can choose to advertise the same or different list of products for the Video Shopping Ads vs. the organic link. You can even run a Video Shopping Ads with an existing video that has no organic link.

  • If you use new videos as an asset for Video Shopping Ads through TikTok Ads Manager (not using Spark Ads), we recommend that you post the video with the TikTok Shop Product Link on your TikTok account first. If you test multiple variations of video captions, you may choose the ads-only mode for the ads.

  • Try to acquire affiliate videos that have been generating GMV for you and/or have high GPM (GMV per impression) as ad creatives assets. Obtain the video code from the affiliate creator. You can see all affiliate videos that have been generating GMV for you in the affiliate section of Seller Center and directly message the creator from Seller Center via Creator Connect.

  • Try to use as many videos and/or TikTok Shop Product Links as possible under the same VSA ad group budget, ideally with three to five active video creatives in each ad group. Use the highest gross revenue and cost cap bid strategies according to preference and experiment with a combination of these two bid strategies. Experiment with using single product links (only one product per ad) and multiple product links (multiple products per ad) to test what works better for your business, as results may vary for different sellers.

  • For the highest gross revenue ad group, keep scaling the budget every week, each time observing the ROAS of the previous 7 days on a rolling basis, and increase or decrease the budget as necessary. For cost cap, we recommend maximizing the budget after the ad has run for more than a day.

  • Besides the official TikTok account connected to your TikTok Shop, you can additionally connect up to four more TikTok accounts with your TikTok Shop for marketing purposes. Take advantage of this by differentiating your marketing accounts based on persona categories to cater to different audience preferences, presenting "UGC" style native content. This helps to broaden your interested audiences.

  • If you are run a LIVE Shopping event, we highly recommend running Live Shopping Ads (LSA), optimizing towards Gross Revenue, and starting with a budget of a few hundred dollars. LIVE Shopping events or LSA may or may not work well for your business. LIVE Shopping performance can be volatile but can work well for some businesses.

  • TikTok Shop does not only offer ads GMV but also trackable organic GMV. It also offers a potentially large pool of "referral" style affiliate creatives that you can use for ads or other purposes.

  • When considering Shop Ads performance, in addition to reviewing Shop Ads ROAS performance, we recommend reviewing overall TikTok Shop marketing ROI, which equates to [Shop total GMV / (Shop Ads ads cost + Shop affiliate commission)]. Consider how much GMV (paid, affiliate, organic) you are getting out of your marketing investment in TikTok Shop. Evaluate your TikTok Shop marketing ROI against your typical marketing ROI targets.