Scaling Your Enterprise D2C Brand with TikTok Shops: Best Practices and Key Metrics

TikTok is a powerhouse for brands looking to reach trend-savvy shoppers. One of its standout features, TikTok Shops, offers a seamless native shopping experience, reduces cart abandonment and provides a direct path to conversion. For enterprise-level D2C brands, TikTok Shops offers an ideal platform to boost sales and foster customer loyalty.

TikTok Shops: Powerful Social Proof

TikTok Shops also taps into powerful social proof, which is critical for driving conversions. According to Power Digital’s State of Social Report, 67% of respondents check a brand’s social media page before purchasing a product, and the most trusted sources of information about products are reviews, word of mouth, and influencers. 

Credit: Power Digital’s State of Social Report [2025]

This speaks volumes about TikTok’s value for D2C brands: the platform’s emphasis on user-generated content, influencer partnerships, and community-driven engagement aligns perfectly with consumer behaviors. TikTok’s affiliate marketing program allows creators to directly promote products to their followers, making it easier to build trust and drive sales through organic content.

As enterprise D2C brands look to expand their presence and scale effectively, TikTok Shops represent a unique opportunity to connect with new audiences, build brand awareness, and drive revenue growth. Now more than ever, it’s time to integrate TikTok into your brand’s marketing strategy.

In this article, we’ll explore the best practices for enterprise D2C brands to succeed on TikTok Shops, as well as the essential metrics that will help ensure your brand’s growth and profitability. Whether you’re new to the platform or looking to optimize your existing efforts, these strategies and insights will help you harness TikTok’s full potential.

How to Drive Revenue with TikTok Shop: Proven Strategies and Best Practices

1. Create a Thoughtful Product Strategy

A well-planned product strategy is essential for driving sales on TikTok Shop. This starts with identifying Hero Products—your top-performing or most viral-ready items—that can capture attention and generate strong engagement. Ensuring these products are optimized for TikTok’s audience means considering factors like pricing, perceived value, and ease of discovery.

Exclusive bundles are another powerful tactic. Offering products together in a package creates added value and gives consumers an incentive to purchase. For example, users often browse TikTok Shop but check platforms like Amazon for better pricing or shipping incentives. By creating limited-edition bundles or special offers exclusive to TikTok Shop, brands can drive urgency and encourage impulse purchases. This strategy is particularly effective during seasonal campaigns like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, where timing and exclusivity enhance consumer interest.

Beyond hero products and bundling, brands should take a holistic merchandising approach by evaluating key factors such as profit margins, audience potential, competitive price points, and shipping incentives. Offering free shipping or optimizing pricing for TikTok’s audience can significantly impact conversion rates. By carefully crafting a product strategy that aligns with TikTok’s unique shopping behaviors, brands can maximize sales and profitability on the platform.

2. Leverage TikTok’s Special Campaigns for More Visibility

TikTok offers unique promotional opportunities through their campaigns, such as the New Year promo, where the platform funds a portion of the discount. By enrolling in TikTok’s promotions, you can get your product tagged with the campaign’s name, gaining additional visibility and driving more traffic to your TikTok Shop. This is a great strategy to employ if you’re looking to quickly scale your presence on TikTok Shop.

Sophia Talese, Associate Director of Paid Media [TikTok] for Power Digital notes that “enrolling in these campaigns is an easy way to boost your brand’s visibility while benefiting from the platform’s promotional power. TikTok might fund part of your discount, but it’s the exposure that really counts, especially when you’re starting with a new TikTok Shop.”

3. Affiliate Marketing Is Key to TikTok Shop Success

One of the biggest differentiators for TikTok Shop compared to other e-commerce platforms is its integrated affiliate marketing capabilities. By working with influencers and creators who promote your products, you tap into their audiences and drive conversions directly through the platform.

Talese emphasizes the importance of building strong relationships with creators and leveraging creator-first content to maximize your shop’s performance. Affiliates who create authentic, relatable content not only drive product discovery but also guide potential customers all the way from research to purchase within TikTok’s closed ecosystem.

The Power Digital team has seen significant success with this approach, particularly when managing affiliate outreach and fostering a deep understanding of how to use TikTok’s affiliate system. Brands that actively nurture these relationships often see a higher return on investment (ROI) through affiliate-driven sales.

4. Focus on the Right Metrics for True Success

While TikTok’s unique shopping features offer great potential, it’s crucial to measure the right KPIs to truly understand your return on investment (ROI). Instead of just focusing on ad performance, we recommend taking a more holistic approach and looking at overall shop performance.

This includes metrics like your shop score (which should be at least 4.5 or higher for maximum visibility) and affiliate performance, such as response rates and post success. Additionally, keeping track of gross merchandise value (GMV) and factoring in the costs associated with ads, affiliate commissions, and fees will give you a clearer picture of profitability.

As Talese points out, it’s easy to get caught up in the GMV numbers, but you need to account for all of the fees—like TikTok’s 8% platform fee and affiliate commissions—to make sure your remaining ROI is positive.

5. Understand the Challenges and Set Realistic Expectations

As with any new platform, TikTok Shop comes with its share of challenges. One common pain point is the technical setup, particularly the integration of Shopify feeds. While Shopify offers a one-click integration, this can sometimes break, leading to sync issues. Brands should be prepared to troubleshoot and ensure their shop is connected correctly to avoid potential delays in order fulfillment.

Additionally, data security can be a concern when submitting confidential information for account setup, especially when providing Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO) details as required by TikTok Shop. Brands must disclose ownership structures, tax identification numbers, and other sensitive financial data, which can raise concerns about privacy and regulatory compliance. To mitigate risks, businesses should ensure they are working with secure platforms, follow best practices for data encryption, and stay informed about TikTok Shop’s privacy policies to protect their information.

Profitability is something brands need to be mindful of—keeping a close eye on both direct and hidden costs will ensure that your TikTok Shop efforts remain profitable. Remember that TikTok Shop takes a platform fee, and when you add affiliate commissions, the margin can become thin quickly.

6. Incorporate Data Insights to Strengthen Your TikTok Strategy

According to Power Digital’s State of Social report, TikTok stands out as a platform for research, and creator-driven content is a major reason why users trust product recommendations. By integrating these findings into your strategy, you can reinforce the platform’s potential to drive both discovery and conversion.

Credit: Power Digital’s State of Social Report [2025]

7. Competitor Platforms Adapting TikTok’s Features

As TikTok Shop continues to grow, other platforms are rushing to implement similar features to capture some of its success. Instagram, YouTube Shorts, and Pinterest have all recently introduced shopping and affiliate tools that mirror TikTok’s approach.

At Power Digital, we recognized that these platforms are trying to “be more like TikTok,” offering affiliate programs and shopping capabilities to keep pace with TikTok’s dominance. This highlights the importance of staying ahead of the curve and continuously testing and optimizing your TikTok Shop strategy while keeping an eye on how other platforms evolve.

Next steps

Ready to take your TikTok Shops strategy to the next level? At Power Digital, our team of experts specializes in helping enterprise D2C brands scale effectively, maximize ROI, and dominate the social commerce space. Contact us to learn how we can tailor a TikTok Shops strategy to your unique goals and help your brand stand out in this competitive market.