How to Sell on TikTok in 7 Simple Steps (2023)

With more than 1 billion active monthly users averaging a daily view time of 95 minutes globally, TikTok is definitely where you should promote your business. And TikTok has made it easier for your customers to buy your products straight from the app.

It’s easy to learn how to sell on TikTok. You just need to choose the right products, create a Business or Pro account, link your shop or products, and actively promote your content. It’s now even easier to sell on the video-sharing app with ecommerce platforms such as Shopify partnering with it to launch in-app shopping.

To start selling on TikTok, follow our guide below.

Step 1: Choose the Right Products

Selling on TikTok starts with learning about the platform, its users, and which products sell well.

Research Your Target Market

Before creating a TikTok account, you need to find out if your target market is using it. As of 2022, 7 out of 10 teens in the US were using TikTok, while more than half (56%) of those aged 20 to 29 are TikTok users. If your market focuses on millennials and Gen Zers, TikTok is the perfect channel for you.

If that’s not your target market, however, don’t cross TikTok off your list just yet. A significant number of US TikTok users are between ages 30 to 49. TikTok is a channel where you can promote brand awareness and connect with a potentially huge audience.

Learn Which Products Sell

TikTok doesn’t provide a list of allowed sellable products, but it lists prohibited items. A quick look at trending videos can give you an idea of what types of products are an excellent fit for the platform. You can look at TikTok’s successful business case studies and explore the #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt hashtag for ideas.

Step 2: Create a TikTok Account

Once you have an idea of which products to sell, it’s time to start playing with TikTok. You can create an account by going to its website or downloading the app from the App Store or Google Play.

If you are using a mobile device to sign up for an account, tap to open it once the app is installed on your phone. Tap Me in the bottom menu bar, then click Sign Up. You can register with your phone number, email address, or an existing social media account.

Do you want to sign up for a TikTok Shop right away? Sign up as a TikTok seller. Remember you need to have a US phone number to register. Enter your business information, choose your business type, submit relevant documents, and then wait two to three days for approval of your application. Once approved, you can link your bank account and upload products to start selling.

Step 3: Switch to a Business or Pro Account

Once you create an account, you are automatically tagged as a personal account, so you would need to switch to a business account. Aside from being able to sell products, switching to a business account enables you to access the following:

• Performance and audience data: Get insights into what type of content your audience prefers
• Business content guide: Advice on everything from choosing a video topic to picking a sound
• Video Showcase: A carousel of popular content from businesses and content creators
• Commercial music library: A library of 150,000+ pre-cleared, royalty-free sounds that you can use for commercial purposes
• Web business suite: Download analytics data, view content creation tips from the Business Creative Hub, and access TikTok for Business for insights

• For a business seller: US Company Registration Document and the Company Owner’s passport or driver’s license
• For an individual seller: A US-issued passport or driver’s license

Follow the steps below to switch to a Business account.

• Step 3.1: Within the app, click on the three dots on your right-hand menu.
• Step 3.2: Click on Manage Account.
• Step 3.3: From the Manage Account screen, click on Switch to Business Account.
• Step 3.4: Choose a category for your business.

Set Up Your Profile

Once you have created your account, you need to optimize your profile before selling. A business account also lets you link your website, email address, and social media accounts.

Here are a few things to consider when setting up your profile:

​​Define Your Brand & Bio

Your TikTok bio is an introduction of your brand to your audience. Make it short and sweet. In a few words, describe your brand and what you do. You can use your slogan or keywords to improve your searchability in TikTok.

Use Emojis

Speak your audience’s language. Since most TikTok users are Gen Zers and millennials, use emojis—they can even help increase conversions.

Add a Call to Action (CTA)

CTAs can change from time to time since this part allows you to tell your audience what to do next. You can direct them to your shop or blog, promote discount codes, or invite them to a hashtag challenge you are doing.

Step 4: Link Your Shop or Products to Your TikTok Account

After optimizing your profile, you are now ready to start listing your products or connecting your ecommerce shop to your account. Below, we detail instructions on connecting a Shopify, BigCommerce, Square Online, WooCommerce and Ecwid store. Once you connect your ecommerce platform to your TikTok, you can:

• Sync your store’s product catalog to TikTok and feature a shopping tab on your TikTok profile
• Include product links in your TikTok videos that point directly to product pages in your store so customers can make a purchase
• Run optimized ads by installing the TikTok Pixel

The TikTok Pixel is a piece of code that you install on your website so when you run paid ads, you can share website visitor events to TikTok for tracking. All the ecommerce platforms we outline below make it easy for you to install the Pixel on your store.

Expand the sections below for details on connecting specific ecommerce platforms:

Connecting Shopify to TikTok

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Connecting BigCommerce to TikTok

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Connecting Square Online to TikTok

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Connecting Ecwid to TikTok

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Connecting WooCommerce to TikTok

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Step 5: Create Engaging Content

Now that you have connected your online store to your TikTok account, it’s time to get creative and promote your products. The only way to do this is to create engaging content that encourages more followers and promotes brand awareness.

Take advantage of Tiktok’s features to learn how to create and roll out engaging content, including:

• Shopping Ads: A three-in-one solution with new formats to adopt and combine: Video Shopping Ads, Catalog Listing Ads, and LIVE Shopping Ads. Catalog Listing Ads is no longer available as a standalone format, but is now part of Video Shopping Ads.
• TikTok Academy: A program designed to educate global audiences on how to best use TikTok for Business.
• Audience Insights: Available from the TikTok Ads Manager, you can explore TikTok user interests, discover audience information through filters to help create campaigns, and strengthen your audience planning workflow with data.
• Security Trust Center: It is an interactive website for sharing security information that allows advertisers to access TikTok’s compliance documents, review its standardized questionnaires, and stay updated on its security capabilities and practices.
• The new TikTok ad type, Focused View (which we will discuss more in detail in Step 7)
• Enhancements to the TikTok Creator Marketplace
• ShowTimes on TikTok: This is a new Instant Page template designed to drive movie-going intent, directly connecting moviegoers to ticketing partners to make purchases.

TikTok Engaging Content: Case Studies

Take a look at how these brands leveraged user-generated content to launch strategic partnerships with influencers and brand collaborations.

GAP

American clothing brand GAP doesn’t have an official TikTok account, but UGC has certainly helped them, being a mainstay favorite among influencers.

Gen Z influencers such as Emma Chamberlain and Barbara Kristofferson were just a few of the influencers that sported a vintage brown spell-out hoodie, providing completely free TikTok marketing

The hoodie hasn’t been released since, but due to demand, GAP obliged by sending out free hoodies to continue the hype, even reissuing the piece for limited edition pre-order to all customers.

@barbarakristoffersenfits♬ Ski Mask The Slump God – Foot Fungus – Kiersten

Crocs

Crocs is famous for its bulky, bright, but comfortable rubber footwear. Gen Z creators are surprisingly huge fans of the brand, giving it indirect TikTok marketing. Crocs is smart enough to jump on the trend, using its resurging popularity to showcase novelty products and collaborations—even doing a bizarre collaboration with KFC.

The brand’s biggest strategic partnership has been the #ThousandDollarCrocs challenge, encouraging users to customize their Crocs with extreme bling, which has been viewed more than 3 billion times as of this writing.

Crocs even had a demand for its Disney’s Pixar Cars: The Movie kids’ collection to be made available in adult sizes, and they complied.

@crocs Back by popular ka-chow! Get ready for Disney and Pixar Cars’ Lightning McQueen adult clogs on 9.8.22 at crocs.com #crocs #croctok #sportmode #lightningmcqueen ♬ original sound – Crocs

Step 6: Partner With Influencers

Since TikTok is a creator-focused platform, partnering with influencers provides exposure for your brand and serves as social proof. One way to find influencers that fit your brand is through the TikTok Creator Marketplace. The platform houses thousands of TikTok creator profiles, and you can filter them to find ones that fit your target audience.

Here are some creator features:

• TTCM Gaming Anchor: Creators can add links to their posts that direct to an in-app landing page where users can click through to the iOS or Android app store to download the app.
• TTCM Comment Anchor: Creators can add and pin a clickable link at the top of comments for users to learn more about the product or service in the video.
• Detailed campaign reporting: Deeper insights about the creator’s marketing performance, such as audience overlap, audience interest distribution, Spark Ads campaign dates, and more.

TikTok Influencer Campaigns: Case Studies

Benefit Cosmetics

When popular makeup brand Benefit Cosmetics released its new Brow Microfilling Pen, it used the TikTok Creator Marketplace (TCM) to launch an awareness campaign. Through the marketplace, they partnered with 22 Gen Z and millennial creators and required them to replicate a brow dance set to an original music track, which of course, featured the product.

The 22 videos were launched in users’ timelines and generated 3,500+ hours of views and 1.4 million impressions, all of which were from just 4.5 minutes of creator content.

@milliet24 Lil transformation video 😆 @benefituk #benefitbrows #microfillingpen #ad ♬ Brows (Benefit Brow Dance) – Regan Aliyah

Newton Baby

When Newton Baby, a brand known for its award-winning crib mattress, planned an awareness campaign highlighting parenting moments in a fun and wholesome way (while also featuring their product), they went with the TCM, setting up a strict criteria for followers and average views per video. Three videos were finished and resulted in an enormous engagement rate of 19.44% across all videos. This allowed the brand to easily measure the impact of the post and gain insights for future campaigns.

@tayandthetwins #sponsored decided to pull a prank on my husband 😬😮 @newtonliving #newtonbaby#newton#HaventSeen#prank#marriage#husbandprank#MakeItMagical#fyp ♬ original sound – courtney

Step 7: Leverage TikTok’s Paid Ads

Apart from creating engaging content, partnering with influencers, and displaying products in your videos, feature your products in TikTok ads so that customers can buy your products right away. It is a great way to tap into this exciting new market.

When creating an ad, TikTok content has the following requirements:

• Image files: JPG or PNG only
• Video files: MP4, MOV, MPEG, 3GP or AVI
• Aspect ratio: 9:16, 1:1 and 16:9 (Vertical)
• Image resolution: 1200×628 (Recommended)
• Video resolution: 720×1280 pixels, 640×640 pixels or 1280×720 pixels
• Video duration: 5 to 60 seconds
• Brand name: Limited to up to 20 characters
• Ad description: Limited to up to 100 characters, no emojis

Types of TikTok Ads

You can run ads in the following formats: in-feed, top-view, branded hashtag challenge, branded lenses, and brand takeovers.

How to Use TikTok for Business

TikTok cannot only become an extension of your online store but it can help drive traffic, promote brand awareness, and increase customer engagement. According to the Sprout Social Index report, 38% of consumers plan on using TikTok, more than double the 17% who were planning on it in 2020.

The same report also states that consumers find short-form videos 2.5x more engaging than long-form videos—a feature TikTok clearly gets right. For more inspiration, check out our guide to creating a TikTok marketing strategy for your small business.

Promote Your Posts

You can promote a video and drive traffic toward your online store (or linked product page). Here’s how:

• Step 1: Tap Me to go to your profile. Click on the three dots in the top right of your screen to go to Settings.
• Step 2: Tap Creator Tools, then Promote.
• Step 3: Under the Promotions page, tap the video you aim to promote (must not contain copyrighted music).
• Step 4: Choose a goal for your video: view, visits, or followers. If you choose more website visits, add a URL and choose a call-to-action button (such as Learn More, Shop Now, or Sign Up).
• Step 5: Tap the circle next to the audience you’d like to reach, then tap Next. You can choose from Automatic (TikTok chooses your audience) or Custom (set up a demographic).
• Step 6: Set your budget duration, add payment information, then tap Start Promotion.

Capitalize on User-generated Content

One of the goals in creating content on TikTok is to drive lots of user-generated content (UGC). Since TikTok is primarily creator-driven content, you won’t have a hard time finding campaign-worthy videos.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Create your own brand’s hashtag challenge and encourage users to join in. Make the hashtag easy and memorable.
• Get your existing customers involved. Ask them to participate in your UGC campaign. Offer discounts in exchange for participation.
• Join in special occasions or a viral craze.
• Run a contest.

Explore other UGC ideas and strategies in our Ultimate Guide to User-Generated Content in Ecommerce.

Utilize Audience Insights

TikTok has a business tool called Audience Insights to help you plan and evaluate your ad campaigns better.

Here are ways you can utilize the tool to help promote content:

• Use the range of available filters to explore audience information during planning through interest hashtags, interactions with hashtag, creator, and video, and TikTok Customer Audiences. You also segment data by language, country, device price.
• Validate and learn about your audience. Use demographics based on age, gender, and location to get a high-level view on what your targeted audience may be interested in or are posting about.
• Find inspiration for targeting and creative strategies. Once you learn about your audience, you might find surprising ideas that can help you strategize better. For example, if you are interested in promoting ads about beauty and skin care, and learn that eyebrow care (how-to’s, products, and makeup) are trending among your audience, you can use this knowledge to expand your content strategy.
• Explore top hashtags and interest categories to plan your content. With Audience Insights, you can view the top 10 hashtags and top ad interest categories that resonate with your audience. Consider incorporating these hashtags or interests when targeting in a campaign or using these hashtags in your video content.

Why You Should Sell on TikTok & Have a TikTok Shop

1. Massive Audience Primed to Buy

1 billion active monthly users …

Averaging 95 minutes of daily view time …

With 150 million users in the US …

If those numbers haven’t convinced you enough, there are 68.9 billion views of #tiktokmademebuyit hashtag as of this writing (September 2023) from 47.6 billion last March.

Clearly, TikTok users aren’t just there to see content—they are also ready to buy if the content engages them. Ninety-two percent of TikTok users said they take action after watching a product in TikTok. Additionally, TikTok users are 1.3 times more likely to feel excited about their product purchases compared to users of other platforms.

2. Easy Set Up

As you have read in the steps we have outlined above, it’s really easy to set up a TikTok Shop or connect your existing ecommerce platform to your brand’s TikTok account. What’s more time-consuming is creating engaging content because that’s how to get sales on TikTok.

3. Low Commision Fees

TikTok has a Marketplace Commission Fee and this rate is based on the cluster, category, and subcategory of product on TikTok Shop. As of the moment, the commission fee is at 2%. TikTok Shop is currently in the early testing stage in the US and the commission rate will be decided in the coming months ahead.

TikTok is one of the platforms that implements a low commission, compared to Amazon, which costs between 8%–15%.

How to Sell on TikTok Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Here are the answers to a few commonly asked questions about selling on TikTok.

How do I become a seller on TikTok?

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How much does it cost to sell on TikTok?

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Bottom Line

TikTok is still an evolving platform, and its in-app shopping experience is relatively new. However, getting into TikTok to promote your online store should be part of your retail marketing strategy. It is the social media platform every business should be in, especially with how fast user-generated content is put out by its users.

If you have an online store like Shopify, it is easy to connect, sync, and advertise your products on TikTok. Explore your options with Shopify’s free trial.

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