How to open a TikTok Shop: the beginner’s guide to social selling

82% of TikTok users in the UK engage in shopping-related activities on the platform such as browsing products, following brands, and watching live shopping events. Social selling (social commerce) is evidently a necessary step for many businesses looking to stay relevant and grow in the UK market.

Social selling through TikTok Shop is extremely simple. The main benefit is reducing the friction between customers seeing a product and making a purchase in three clicks. 

Getting started

One key thing to note is that each registered business can only have one TikTok Shop page. You can have your sub brands listed on the same store without issues.

To register your account, you’ll need:

• An email address
• Details of your businesses type
• Business details such as the address and employment identification number (EIN)
• Details of the primary representative of the business
• Business or warehouse address

Preparing for sale

There are five key stages in setting up your account to be ready to start selling and this can take around an hour – as long as you’ve got everything you need on hand.

Step 1: Register your TikTok Shop account

Step 2: Add your business’ tax information

Step 3: Set-up shipping (you can do this through a courier or integrate your own system)

Step 4: List your first product

Step 5: Connect your TikTok Shop account to a business or personal TikTok account

How to list new products

There are three ways to list products, one may be better suited to your needs. 

1. Manual upload: you can manually upload products one at a time (best for a small product offering)
2. API upload: you can sync it with an online store (most general e-commerce platforms integrate, such as Shopify or Amazon, find this under ‘Growth Centre’ and then ‘App store’ for all APIs)
3. Bulk upload: You can do a bulk upload, fill out the template available on the desktop Seller Centre

Tips: it’s recommended to use five to nine images for each product listing (excluding sets), and these should be a minimum of 1080p, taken from various angles and in PNG or JPEG format. You can use the ‘optimisation’ feature in the Seller Centre to add a white background. Duplicate images are not allowed; they are classified as a violation.

What is the TikTok Seller Centre?

TikTok Seller Centre is a separate platform by TikTok to help businesses manage their e-commerce stores and operations on TikTok. Some of the key features are managing store operations, engaging with customers and resources for learning and improving your TikTok Shop.

How to start growing

To grow you’ll want to be populating your businesses account with frequent videos linking to your products. To do this, record a video and proceed to the ‘post’ section, next you’ll want to scroll down and select ‘add link’ and select the relevant product.

It’s best to do A/B testing for your newly listed products, trying different hashtags, trending audios and even content types – your niche will have its own algorithm, and your challenge is learning this. You can emulate competitors, but you’ll want to offer valuable content to your customer base, boosting your organic traffic and engagement.

Affiliates

One crucial aspect of TikTok Shop selling is affiliate marketing – you can set commission rates for your products, and you’re presented with a variety of options through the affiliate centre.

There are four options – 

1. Open collaboration allows anyone to promote your products through a link on content of their choice.
2. Target collaboration allows you to invite specific accounts/creators to promote your products through a product link.
3. Find Creators allows you to look for creators in your niche; you can view their views, sales volume and engagement on past promotional/affiliate content.
4. Sample requests let you can manage your samples, send them to creators who have requested them, or to creators of your choice. You can also give accounts custom commission rates on products to incentivise promotion. In sample requests you can see followers, post rate, views and sales volume on past samples creators have received.

Promotions

Another promotional tool you can utilise is discounting and flash sales which are manageable in the Seller Centre.

Advertisements

You may want to support your marketing efforts with paid advertisements; you can use personal or User-Generated content to run ads using a SPARK code. These are called Spark ads; they show up as regular content in users’ feeds with a small icon indicating that the content is sponsored, however, it is interactive like a normal post and far less disruptive. 

Spark Ads also contribute to account growth, as regular ads don’t allow for page visits or follows, forcing users onto a landing page, but Spark Ads don’t do this. This is highly cost effective for A/B testing too, you can test advertisements as organics posts before turning them into Spark ads.

To ensure success on TikTok Shop you need to display a strong brand image to facilitate consumer trust. You should use organic posting to grow your TikTok page and create content personally as a member of the business. User-generated content will also strengthen brand trust; however, you should not solely rely on creators for your branding.

Please note that to run ads, you need to be using a TikTok business account.

Our ReelGenius packages are the best way to start populating your social media accounts with high quality video content. If you need help creating content for your business, get in touch.