What you keep on every order after all fees, fulfilment and commission.
If you are on the VAT Flat Rate Scheme you generally cannot reclaim input VAT, so select 'Not VAT registered' and enter costs including VAT.
The standard UK platform fee is 9%. Selected electronics and beauty / personal care products qualify for 5% - click here to see if you qualify. New sellers pay a promotional 3% for a limited period after launch. Payment processing is included in TikTok's platform fee in the UK, so there is nothing separate to add.
Enter costs excluding VAT - you reclaim the VAT on these, so the ex-VAT figure is your real cost. Carrier rate cards usually quote ex-VAT already. If you use TikTok Shipping rather than your own carrier, those logistics and shipping service fees also carry reclaimable VAT, so use the ex-VAT figure.
If margins are tight, we recommend 48-hour tracked rather than 24-hour delivery. It typically saves £0.60-1.20 per order with very little effect on conversion, and still comfortably meets TikTok's despatch requirements.
| Measure | Result |
|---|
All margins and break-even figures on this page are calculated against the product price after discounts, excluding customer-paid shipping. This is the same basis TikTok Ads Manager uses to report ROAS, and the same basis the published UK margin benchmarks are measured on, so the figures here can be compared directly with both. Customer-paid shipping is still counted as income within profit per order.
We charge 10% of attributed sales, with no VAT added, on the same basis your creators are paid: after your own discounts, excluding shipping, and less all returns, refunds and cancellations. You are never charged on a sale you did not keep.
Advertising protections. If ROAS falls below 1:1 in a month, we charge no commission at all on ad-driven sales. Commission on ad-driven sales is capped at 35% of your ad spend that month, and drops to 7% once monthly ad spend exceeds £3,000.
The rule behind break-even ROAS. ROAS here is gross sales divided by ad spend, as TikTok Ads Manager reports it. Break-even ROAS is 1 divided by your contribution margin on an ad-driven order, then divided again by the share of orders you keep after returns: keep 33% of a sale and ads break even at 3:1 before returns, or 3.2:1 at a 5% return rate. This is why average order value matters more than ad targeting, since VAT and fulfilment barely move with basket size.
| Measure | UK benchmark |
|---|---|
| Net margin, health and supplements | 25-40% |
| Net margin, beauty and personal care | 25-35% |
| Net margin, home and kitchen | 15-25% |
| Net margin, fashion and accessories | 15-25% |
| Net margin, food and beverage | 8-15% |
| Gross margin of shops that scale well | 55-70% |
| Return rate, platform average | 8-15% |
| Ad spend as a share of revenue | 8-12% |
| Working floor for contribution margin | 25% |
Sources: margn.shop UK category benchmarks 2026; Z Media UK fee audit of 500+ seller accounts; Dashboardly and Canopy Management return-rate data; ShortformNation 2026 seller handbook. Independent figures, not ours, and directional rather than audited.
| Line | Organic | Ads | Direct |
|---|
TikTok platform fee. ((Net sales + customer-paid shipping + platform discount) - (refunds + platform discount refunds)) x rate. Net sales is the original price less seller and platform discounts, so the platform discount cancels out and the base is simply the price after your own discount, plus customer-paid shipping. The UK rate is inclusive of VAT.
Creator and shop ads commission. Rate x (product price - seller discount - platform discount). This is the price the customer pays, so for standard-rated goods you pay commission on the VAT element too. Customer-paid shipping is never included.
Agency commission. Charged on exactly the same figure as creator commission: the product price after all discounts, excluding shipping, less returns and cancellations. The money moves differently, though - TikTok deducts creator commission from the order and pays the creator once the return window closes, whereas an agency invoices you.
Optional TikTok promotions. Smart Promotions, product vouchers and shipping promotions are opt-in programmes charged on top of the standard platform fee, on the same base. Rates vary by programme and campaign - check Seller Centre for what is currently active on your shop. Set this to 0 if you do not use them.
Refunds. No commission of any kind is charged on a refunded or cancelled order. If a full order is returned, TikTok refunds the platform fee in full.
VAT. If you are VAT registered, enter every cost excluding VAT, because you reclaim the VAT element and the ex-VAT figure is your true cost. Your selling price stays VAT-inclusive because that is what the customer pays, and VAT on sales is deducted as a single line.
TikTok invoices its fees through TikTok Information Technologies UK Limited (commission and promotions) and Perceiver Limited (logistics and shipping service fees), both UK VAT-registered. All carry 20% VAT, shown as a separate line on the tax invoices in Seller Centre under Finance > Invoices, and all are reclaimable if you are VAT registered. This calculator therefore shows TikTok's fees net of the reclaimable element, so a 9% rate costs you 7.5%.
Creator commission carries no reclaimable VAT, since affiliate creators are rarely VAT registered, and this calculator does not net it. Agency commission depends on your agency: if it is VAT registered it will add VAT on top of its rate, so enter the rate including that VAT if you cannot reclaim it, or the headline rate if you can. CreateFirst adds no VAT to its 10%.
If you are not VAT registered, or you are on the VAT Flat Rate Scheme, select 'Not VAT registered' and enter every cost including VAT.
Most orders do not carry every cost. Organic creator-attributed orders pay creator and agency commission, orders from ads pay a lower shop ads rate, and direct or repeat orders from your shop tab, search or a returning customer pay neither. The headline figures above blend all three using the mix set further down the page, which is how published margin benchmarks are measured.
Repeat purchases never carry creator or agency commission. Only the share you set as coming back through TikTok Shop pays the platform fee; the rest is assumed to happen on your own site. A physical reorder still costs you goods and fulfilment; a digital renewal - a SIM plan, a subscription, a top-up - costs you the goods only. First orders are unaffected.
| Line | Amount |
|---|
Independent 2026 data puts the average active TikTok Shop seller at roughly 18% net margin, with a range of 5-49% driven mainly by creator strategy and return rate, and an all-in platform take of 38-52% of order value. Break-even ROAS is 1 divided by net margin on every published model we can find. If your figures land near 18%, you are at the market average rather than behind it.
Samples cost you the product plus postage. Orders that are not creator-attributed carry TikTok's platform fee but no creator commission and no commission to us. Repeat purchases carry neither, and only the share you set as coming back through TikTok Shop pays the platform fee.
TikTok Shop UK charges a 9% platform fee on most categories, raised from 6% in January 2026. Selected electronics and beauty products qualify for 5%, and new sellers pay a promotional 3% for a limited period. Payment processing is included, so there is no separate card fee as there would be on your own website.
On top of that sits creator commission, the affiliate rate you set in Seller Centre. UK rates typically run 10-20%, and creators filter the marketplace by rate, so a low figure means very few will promote your product. Creator commission is charged on the product price after discounts and never on shipping.
The cost most sellers forget is VAT. UK shelf prices include it, so a VAT-registered seller loses 16.7% of the order value before any other cost. This is the single biggest reason UK margins look worse than the American TikTok Shop case studies you see online, where sales tax is added at checkout instead.
As a working rule, a product needs 55-70% gross margin to scale properly on TikTok Shop, and around 25% contribution margin once every cost is loaded in. Below 40% gross margin there is no room to fund creator commission and ads at the same time.
Average order value matters more than almost anything else. Fulfilment and VAT barely move with basket size, so a £15 product and a £35 product carry nearly the same costs in pounds but very different costs as a percentage. Bundling and multipacks lift margin faster than any amount of ad optimisation.
Break-even ROAS is simply 1 divided by your contribution margin. Keep 33% of the order value and ads break even at 3:1. Keep 20% and you need 5:1. First campaigns usually underperform, often returning closer to 1.2x, and improve as more creator videos become available for the algorithm to test. Ad performance on TikTok Shop is driven by the volume of creator content far more than by budget.
The standard UK platform fee is 9% of the order value, with 5% for selected electronics and beauty products and a promotional 3% for new sellers. That rate is inclusive of VAT, so a VAT-registered seller reclaims the VAT element and the real cost is 7.5%. Creator commission, which you set yourself, sits on top of that, as does any agency fee and your own advertising spend.
It can be, but it depends almost entirely on product margin and average order value rather than on marketing. Published UK benchmarks put net margins at 25-40% for supplements, 25-35% for beauty, 15-25% for home and fashion, and 8-15% for food and drink. Products with low basket values and high return rates struggle.
The seller does, and only when a sale happens. You set the rate in Seller Centre, TikTok deducts it from the order, and the creator is paid automatically once the return window has passed. Nothing is paid for content that does not sell.
Platform-wide return rates run 8-15%. Food and consumables sit at the low end around 3-6%, beauty around 5-8%, and fashion as high as 18-25%. Every 10 points of return rate costs roughly 4-6 points of net margin, so returns matter more than most sellers expect.
UK sellers run roughly 5-6 percentage points below an identical US business, for two structural reasons. First, VAT sits inside the UK shelf price, so a VAT-registered seller loses 16.7% of the order value before anything else happens, while US prices exclude sales tax and it is added at checkout. Second, the UK platform fee moved from 6% to 9% in January 2026, while the US standard rate stayed at 6%. A product at 25% net margin in the US sits nearer 19-20% in the UK, so American TikTok Shop case studies are not directly comparable.
Creator videos sell beyond the orders they are credited with. Someone sees your product on TikTok, then buys it on your own website, searches for your brand, or recognises the packaging in a shop. None of that appears in TikTok Seller Centre, so none of it is counted here. In practice it is one of the largest returns from creator content: Mozillion saw a 50% uplift on their own website while their TikTok Shop was running, which is revenue the shop generated but was never credited with. This calculator counts only orders placed through TikTok Shop itself, so treat anything the halo effect adds as upside on top of the figures here.
Yes. Set the agency commission field to whatever your agency charges, or to zero if you run TikTok Shop in-house.
Tell us about your brand and we'll come back within one working day with a launch plan for your TikTok Shop.