Unless you've been living under a rock, you've definitely seen a viral TikTok video at least once. What if we told you that these viral clips can be your sales magnets? Follow along to see how to sell products on TikTok and become a CEO of profitable TikTok trends.
TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social media giants, known for letting people express themselves and consume entertaining user-generated content. The top trending categories on TikTok are lip sync, dance, comedy, DIY, beauty, fashion, tutorials, education, and live streaming.
While owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok works globally but is not available within mainland China itself. Instead, the Chinese use its sibling app, Douyin.
Brands wanting to sell with TikTok require a business account. Besides posting and interacting with consumers, this profile type lets you access TikTok's in-depth analytics, specify extra info in your bio, and take advantage of commercial tools and features.
There are two basic methods to sell things on TikTok: you can promote them with TikTok Ads and sell them right on the platform with a TikTok Shop.
TikTok Catalog Ads seamlessly show your products in users' feeds. You determine your goal, budget, items to promote, and target audience during the campaign launch. Then, thanks to its powerful recommendation algorithms, TikTok will place your product ads in front of those most likely to convert.
Retailers in specific regions can also open a TikTok Shop. It's an in-app storefront via which shoppers can view and buy your goods without leaving TikTok. Your Shop's offers will be featured on a unified TikTok marketplace as well, further expanding your reach.
Around 1.5 billion people worldwide actively scroll through TikTok every month, and more than 150 million of them are from the US alone. By selling on TikTok, you can turn all these scrollers into loyal followers and paying customers.
TikTok generally has the highest engagement rates among social media sites, beating pillars like Instagram and Facebook. On average, rates sit at around 2-7%, but accounts of any size and niche can see numbers as big as 17-20%.
Roughly two-thirds of TikTok users are under 35 years old, among whom are 82% of Gen Z who use social media sites. That's why TikTok is a must-have channel for stores targeting young Millennials, Zoomers, and Gen Alpha.
For approximately 58% of TikTokers, discovering new products from retailers who sell on TikTok is one of the primary reasons they come to the app. About the same percentage of buyers visit the platform to research brands.
According to a 2021 TikTok study, 3 out of 4 shoppers from the US are likely to complete a purchase while browsing the app. TikTok's impactful network of influencers also inspires many consumers to buy something impulsively.
In 2024, TikTok's revenue from in-app purchases reached $6 billion, making it the first non-gaming app to generate such a large amount in a single year. TikTok is among the top 5 online marketing platforms driving the biggest ROI.
To grow on TikTok as a business, you must first create a TikTok for Business user account. It's extremely straightforward: you download the mobile app or visit the desktop site, authorize using a personal profile, and change this profile into a business one.
Retailers can organize all their activity on TikTok from one place, the TikTok Business Center. This includes content scheduling, collaboration management, advertising, and selling online on TikTok Shop.
You get started in TikTok Business Center by signing up at business.tiktok.com with your business account. The platform will then help you onboard and configure some core details. Once you're in, we recommend that you look through your Center's Business settings and fill them out as much as possible.
You can get products on TikTok in bulk and fast using a product feed. While TikTok offers template files for you to complete manually, it is much easier and more reliable to make TikTok feeds with specialized product feed software such as Mulwi.
Mulwi has the same ready-made TikTok Ads Shopify feed template and automatically populates it with your store's latest data. It's already optimized for best performance, but you're free to adjust it as needed. Of course, Mulwi can export your listings in different languages and currencies so you can advertise anywhere in the world.
Need a Shopify product feed for TikTok Shop? We can build it for you at no charge. Simply send a request to the Mulwi support team with your requirements and we'll handle the rest. Like the one for TikTok Ads, this feed will also include auto-updates, perfect structure, and flexible editing.
Install Mulwi from the Shopify app store and get a 7-day free trial with unlimited features.
TikTok gathered all its tools for advertisers on a dedicated subplatform called TikTok Ads Manager. This section of the Business Center is where you add goods you want to promote, configure campaigns for them, and check on your performance.
Among the dozens of available ad formats, the best one to drive more sales on TikTok is Catalog Ads. But to measure their effectiveness properly, you should additionally set up a TikTok Pixel, which is a code fragment that records conversions in your store.
To sell products with TikTok Catalog Ads, you must first create a catalog for storing your items and upload their information in it using the "data feed schedule" method and URL from Mulwi. With this setup, TikTok can fetch a fresh feed file and update your product info at least once a day. After your catalog is up, you can then move on to launching ads.
Apart from advertising, merchants in the US and other supported regions can sell products on TikTok Shop. For working with Shops, TikTok developed another suite inside its Business Center known as Seller Center.
Once you sign in to the Seller Center for your country, TikTok will help you quickly set up the main aspects of your Shop. At first, you just enter some basic business details like contacts and warehouse address, but further on, you need to provide documents that prove your eligibility to sell products on TikTok.
Before you can start adding products to your new Shop, you will have to wait for TikTok to approve it. The verification can take up to 2 days. In the meantime, you should go through the Shop's other settings, such as payment and shipping methods, and complete them. Now you can also link your TikTok Shop to the Business Center in case you later decide to boost it with TikTok Shop Ads.
After your Shop's been given the green light, you can finally populate it with your products. Currently, TikTok supports only manual feed upload, so you will have to regularly resubmit a fresh file yourself to keep your listings up-to-date.
TikTok isn't a set-it-and-forget-it platform. If a Shop and Ads are the only interesting things happening on your TikTok page, few to no TikTokers will ever buy from you.
For you to sell something on TikTok and stay relatable, you must, in addition to the paid one, invest in organic content as well. So, next you should go get your best video scripts and start creating tons of your own TikToks! In case you're unsure what topic to cover first, just check out the hot memes, pop culture hits, niche obsessions, local challenges, and other entertainment trends that landed on your TikTok FYP.
You might think that since a Shopify product feed is just a common file, you can make it manually. But "you can" doesn't mean you should. It's much faster, safer and more fun to build it using a dedicated feed management solution.
To create a TikTok product feed with Mulwi, for example, you simply need to fill out several fields in our prebuilt template. Or you can take an even easier path and ask our seasoned support experts to configure one for you. Either way, you'll get a tip-top TikTok feed that will perform at its best.
With Mulwi, your products on TikTok will not only follow trends, but lead and set them.
