What Is TikTok Shop? How to Register for TikTok Shop

Officially launched in 2022, TikTok Shop has attracted a large number of users with a passion for business. Is this a fertile market that can deliver profits as promising as those earlier online platforms that once set records? Let’s take a detailed look at what TikTok Shop is and what it takes to “open the doors” of your own TikTok store right now!

What Is TikTok Shop?

TikTok Shop is one of the newer features that lets users open a commercial storefront on the TikTok platform through a business account. Products are presented to customers through feed videos, livestreams, and a featured-products tab on the seller’s profile page.

TikTok Shop is also considered an effective environment for marketing products. Here, sellers have the chance to tap into a pool of potential customers and do business with ease.

How TikTok Shop Works

To build a smooth sales channel, you need to understand how TikTok Shop operates, as well as the rules for online stores on TikTok Shop:

• For sellers: The shop owner must hold a business registration or be the head of a sole-proprietor household business.
• For listed products: Shop owners list products with detailed descriptions, just like on other e-commerce platforms, using the TikTok Seller system, which provides all the useful features an online store needs.
• For intermediary promoters (KOLs): They can sign up as affiliate marketers, provided their channel has at least 100k followers.
• For payment: TikTok Shop does not offer cash on delivery (COD). So when buying online on TikTok Shop, buyers must first transfer the money into TikTok’s system. After fees are deducted, the remaining amount is sent to the seller. TikTok Shop is working to add payment options soon, such as card payments and e-wallets, to make shopping more convenient for users.
• For shipping: As with other e-commerce platforms, shipping carriers come to the seller’s warehouse to pick up goods and deliver them to the buyer. TikTok’s shipping carrier in Vietnam is J&T Express.
• TikTok acts as an intermediary distributor between sellers and buyers. For that reason, TikTok charges an online payment platform fee to customers. Currently, TikTok Shop’s initial platform fee in Vietnam is 1%.

Pros and Cons of TikTok Shop

Advantages of TikTok Shop

Now that we have covered what TikTok Shop is and how its business model works, we will walk you through the advantages of TikTok Shop:

A young audience and a fast-growing user base

TikTok’s audience falls between the ages of 12 and 40. This is a customer group with strong purchasing power and an established habit of shopping online on e-commerce platforms. What’s more, with technology advancing at today’s pace, the user base will keep expanding in the future, promising high-profit business potential.

Unlimited distribution potential

The TikTok Shop platform first distributes your sales content to a random group of viewers. Then, once it sees positive signals from those test groups, it quickly expands the audience it reaches. As a result, your content reaches users very fast.

This is a plus point of TikTok Shop’s algorithm, and it creates a level playing field for all sellers. There is no condition favoring new or established shops, or those with many or few followers: everyone has the same chance of having their content distributed.

High conversion rate

TikTok runs on the video format. Video tends to stir viewers’ emotions and trigger the urge to buy more easily than other types of content. As proof, even long-established content platforms such as YouTube, Shopee, and, more recently, Facebook Reels cannot stay out of the short-video race.

YouTube has started rolling out short videos, Shopee Indonesia has shifted to Shopee Live, and Facebook Reels shares many similarities with TikTok videos as short, vertical-format clips. Clearly, TikTok has been enormously successful in sparking a revolution in video content creation. This forces e-commerce platforms to change quickly to keep up with consumer trends.

For example, when a new seller sets up a store on Shopee and lists products, they have to wait a long time for organic sales, and an overnight explosion of orders is out of the question. On TikTok Shop, by contrast, a shop can reach several thousand orders at once when its video suddenly becomes a trend.

Content matters more than ads

One big difference sellers will notice on TikTok Shop is advertising. Today, TikTok in Vietnam runs mainly on display ads, and the density of paid ad placements is low. This is based on viewer psychology, since too many ads are annoying. TikTok wants to keep users engaged through quality video content. It values creative content over businesses spending money to run ads. So whoever has better content gains a stronger competitive advantage.

The buying journey in TikTok Shop’s video shopping consists of these stages: The viewer watches a video => Clicks the shopping cart icon => Lands on the product detail page => Goes to the selection page => Fills in purchase information.

TikTok values content quality above all

Disadvantages

• If you go without engagement for a long time, your channel’s engagement will be throttled. As a result, your videos not only fail to reach many people, but your follower count may even drop.
• Sales do not come from customer need: Unlike other online e-commerce platforms such as Shopee, Tiki, and Lazada, where sales usually stem from buyers’ needs, TikTok Shop generates orders from the spur-of-the-moment emotions viewers feel while watching videos. This is a major challenge for sellers, because most viewers focus on the video content rather than the quality of the product.

Requirements to Open a TikTok Shop Store

TikTok Shop does not limit who can register to sell. When registering to open a store, users fall into 2 segments:

• For personal accounts, meaning content creators who have had a TikTok account for some time: The account owner must be over 18 and have at least 10,000 followers
• For business accounts: You must have a legal entity in Vietnam, and your products must belong to categories permitted under Vietnamese law.

How to Register for TikTok Shop

Here are the steps to open a TikTok Shop store that you can follow:

Step 1. Go to the TikTok Website

Visit the official TikTok Shop website: https://seller-vn.tiktok.com/

Step 2: Provide Your Information

• Click Sign Up. Here, the system gives you 2 options: Sign up with a TikTok account or Sign up with email/phone number. If you sign up with a TikTok account, you only need to confirm authorization for TikTok Shop.

• If you sign up with email/phone number, you need one more step: filling in the registration form. When you finish, the system will notify you. Click Get Started to move on to the main interface of the TikTok Shop seller channel.

If you choose to sign up with email/phone number, you need one more step: filling in the registration form

Step 3: Toolbar Functions in TikTok Shop Seller Center

• Home: Shows your store status, products, and sales data.
• Products: Track, manage, and adjust your products.
• Orders: Track order status.
• Shipping: Track and manage shipping and delivery matters.
• Promotions: Create discount programs, set up sales livestreams, and more.
• Finance: Manage your overall budget
• Data Compass: Compiles data from your TikTok channel and store so owners can adjust their policies in time.
• My Account: Contains your store’s account information and lets sellers edit it or add further details.
• Account Health: The area that lists violations and warnings issued to the seller’s TikTok Shop store.
• Help Center: Answers sellers’ questions

Step 4: Verify Your Documents

• This is the final step in opening a TikTok Shop store and gaining access to the platform’s other features. Choose Upload Documents. Then, if you want to create a store managed by an individual, choose Individually Owned Business. Conversely, if a company or organization manages it in its own name, choose Company.
• If you choose Individually Owned Business, provide your full personal information. If you choose Company, the system will ask you to upload the company’s registration documents. After you complete document verification, click Submit and wait for your application to be reviewed. If TikTok approves it, you will receive a notification from the system, along with support for the selling features on TikTok Shop.

Important Notes When Registering for TikTok Shop

To use TikTok Shop effectively and generate plenty of orders, keep the following in mind:

• Never feature stimulants, dangerous items, or prohibited actions. When these appear in a video, TikTok will put your video on the list of community guideline violations.
• Any product you introduce during a livestream must be in the shopping cart.
• TikTok currently prohibits leaving a phone number in titles or captions. If you violate this rule, your video will be banned from all forms of distribution.
• Do not use copyrighted audio, or your video will be removed, blocked, or muted.
• Repeatedly reposting the same videos will also be flagged as spam by AI and can get your account banned.

This article has answered the question “what is TikTok Shop” and given you detailed instructions for opening a store on TikTok Shop. We hope it gives you more information about doing business online on TikTok Shop and what to expect when trading on this marketing platform. If your business is looking for a partner specializing in integrated marketing strategy, especially on the TikTok platform, contact The7 for support today!

>>> See more:

• What is TikTok? The new marketing trend of 2024
• TikTok advertising services
• A guide to running TikTok ads effectively
• What is TikTok Business? A guide to creating a TikTok Business account