TikTok Shop Fees in 2025: The Complete Breakdown for Sellers

TikTok Shop has become one of the fastest-growing places to sell handmade and physical products. Viral moments can move hundreds of units in a single day. The reach is real. But so are the fees.

And unlike Etsy, where the fee structure has been stable for years, TikTok Shop changed its entire fee model in 2025 — shifting to category-based rates that most sellers haven’t fully recalculated yet.

If you’re selling on TikTok Shop and basing your pricing on old numbers, you’re probably making less than you think. Here’s everything you need to know.

How TikTok Shop fees work in 2025

TikTok Shop charges fees in layers. Each layer is small on its own. Together they can take 25–35% of your revenue before you’ve counted a single expense.

1. Referral fee — 5% to 8% depending on category

This is TikTok’s base commission on every sale. In 2025, TikTok moved from a flat rate to category-based fees. Most categories now sit between 5% and 8%.

Common category rates:

• Beauty and personal care: 8%
• Clothing and accessories: 7%
• Home and kitchen: 6%
• Handmade and craft supplies: 6%
• Food and beverage: 5%

This fee applies to the item price plus any shipping you charge the buyer.

2. Transaction fee — 2% + $0.30

Every completed order goes through TikTok’s payment system, which charges a processing fee. This is separate from the referral fee and applies to the full transaction amount.

3. Affiliate commission — 10% to 20% (if you use creators)

This is where TikTok Shop gets expensive fast. If your products are promoted by affiliate creators — which is how most TikTok Shop sales happen — you pay them a commission on every sale they generate. Most creator deals range from 10% to 20% of the sale price.

A viral video that sells 500 units at 15% commission is $7.50 per unit going to the creator. On a $30 product that’s $3,750 in commissions from one video. That’s not necessarily bad — you generated $15,000 in sales. But if your margin before commission was only 20%, you’ve just eliminated it entirely.

4. Shipping costs — varies

If you’re using Fulfilled by TikTok (FBT), a single-item order costs approximately $3.58 to fulfill, with additional charges for heavier or multi-item orders. If you’re self-fulfilling, your actual carrier costs apply.

5. Returns and refunds — platform-enforced

TikTok Shop has an aggressive buyer protection policy. Refund rates on viral products can run 8–15%, especially for products that look different in person than in a video. Every refund is a full reversal of your revenue — but you may still owe shipping costs and creator commissions on that sale.

6. UK seller fee — £0.50 per order (from July 2025)

For UK sellers using the Merchant-Fulfilled Network, TikTok introduced a £0.50 per-order service fee starting July 15, 2025. This is in addition to the referral and transaction fees.

A real example: what you keep on a $30 TikTok Shop sale

Let’s say you sell a handmade skincare product for $30. A creator promotes it, and you make 100 sales from their video.

39% margin on a $30 product.That’s workable — but notice that before you counted a single expense, TikTok and the creator took $12.30 out of your $30 sale.

Now add a 10% refund rate. 10 of your 100 sales get refunded. You lose $300 in revenue but you’ve already paid creator commissions and possibly shipping on those orders.

Real profit after refunds: closer to $9.50 per sale on average.

That’s the math TikTok’s Seller Center dashboard doesn’t show you.

The Gross Revenue Trap

TikTok Seller Center shows you GMV — Gross Merchandise Value. That’s the total value of all orders placed, before any fees, commissions, or refunds.

It’s a vanity metric.

A seller with $10,000 in GMV might be taking home $4,000 after everything. Or $1,500. The GMV number tells you nothing about profitability.

The sellers who are actually building businesses on TikTok Shop are the ones tracking net profit — what lands in their bank account after every fee layer has been subtracted.

The ones chasing GMV are the ones who run out of cash despite high sales numbers.

How affiliate commissions change everything

Most TikTok Shop growth comes from creator affiliates. A creator posts a video, their followers buy your product, you pay the creator a percentage of every sale. This works. It’s also where most sellers lose control of their margins.

The problem is that sellers often approve creator sample requests and commission rates without modeling the math first. A 20% commission sounds fine on a product with 60% gross margin. It’s a disaster on a product with 25% gross margin.

Before you approve any creator deal, calculate this:

Sale price − all TikTok fees − creator commission − product cost − shipping = real profit

If that number is negative, the creator deal costs you money on every sale. Volume makes it worse, not better.

TikTok Shop vs Etsy: where do you actually make more?

This depends entirely on your product, your price point, and whether you use affiliates. But here’s a general comparison:

Neither platform is better universally. Etsy works better for products with stable search demand. TikTok Shop works better for products that are visually compelling and impulse-buy friendly.

The sellers who do best use both — and track each channel separately to know where they’re actually making money.

How to track TikTok Shop profit correctly

You need to track each sale with:

• Actual sale price
• Platform referral fee for your category
• Transaction processing fee
• Creator commission if applicable
• Actual shipping cost
• Product cost including materials and packaging
• Refund adjustments

Doing this manually in a spreadsheet is possible for 10 sales a month. At 100+ sales, it becomes a full-time job.

ProfitPeek lets you log TikTok Shop sales and apply the correct fee structure automatically. You see your real profit per sale and your profit by channel — so you can compare what you’re actually making on Etsy vs TikTok vs Instagram side by side.

What to do if your TikTok margins are too thin

Audit your creator deals first. Pull every active affiliate commission rate and model the profit at that rate. Any deal where your real profit goes negative needs to be renegotiated or cancelled.

Check your refund rate by product.Some products have chronic refund problems — usually because they look better in video than in person. Those products need either better packaging, better expectation-setting in the listing, or removal from TikTok Shop entirely.

Raise prices strategically.TikTok buyers are often less price-sensitive than Etsy buyers because they’re buying on impulse after seeing a video. A $32 price point often converts nearly as well as $28 — and the margin difference across 200 sales is significant.

Track net profit by channel, not total GMV. The number that matters is what lands in your account after every fee is paid. Build your decisions around that number.

Bottom line

TikTok Shop is a real opportunity for handmade and physical product sellers. The reach is unlike anything else available right now.

But the fee structure is more complex than most sellers realize — and it changed significantly in 2025. If you’re still pricing based on old numbers or relying on GMV as your success metric, you’re flying blind.

Know what you actually keep. Make decisions from there.