TikTok Shop fee calculator

How TikTok Shop fees actually stack

On the default sale above — a $40 item, $5 shipping paid by the buyer, $12 of goods, $4 postage, $1 of packaging — the buyer pays $45.00. Fees come to $4.30, or 9.6% of that, and you keep $23.70 before tax and before any affiliate commission. That is a friendlier headline rate than Etsy or eBay, and it is exactly why the affiliate question matters so much here:

1. Referral fee — 6% by default

Charged on the item price and, on the default here, on the shipping the buyer pays too. On a $45 order the default 6% is $2.70. TikTok sets referral rates by category and by country and adjusts them, so treat 6% as a starting value and replace it with your own Seller Center figure.

2. Payment processing — about 2.9% + $0.30

On the same order, about $1.60. The fixed part is what hurts small orders: on a $9 order $0.30 alone is 3.3% of the sale before the percentage fees have even started.

3. Affiliate commission — often the largest single line

If a creator sells your product through the affiliate marketplace, you pay the rate you set — commonly in the 10–20% range for competitive categories. On a $45 order a 15% commission is $6.75, more than the referral fee and processing combined. Type your commission rate into the box above and every number on this page — profit, margin, break-even, target price — is recalculated after it. This is the fee sellers are most surprised by, because it never appears next to the others on the payout page; the payout is simply smaller.

4. Shipping subsidies and promotions

Free-shipping campaigns, vouchers and seller-funded discounts all come out of your side. Enter them as postage or "packaging / other" so the sale you are checking is the real one. A price that only works while a subsidy runs is not a price you can repeat.

Not covered here: sales tax and VAT (collected and passed on, not your income), TikTok Ads spend, returns and refund rates, and currency conversion. Enter ads or an expected refund loss in "packaging / other" if you want them inside the number.

What the break-even price tells you

With these costs the item breaks even at $13.99 before any affiliate commission. Below that, every sale is a loss. On a cheap item the fixed fees bite harder: a $10 item with $3 shipping and $4.50 of real cost keeps only $4.04, and its effective fee rate rises to 11.2% even though the headline rate has not changed. To keep 30% of revenue rather than merely any profit, this item needs $23.31. Now set the affiliate box to 15% and both numbers climb at once — that is the real price of a creator sale, and it is better to know it before you set the commission than after.

Low-ticket versus high-ticket

Because processing carries a fixed charge and affiliates take a percentage, the arithmetic punishes $5–$10 single items and rewards bundles. If one unit clears a dollar, three units sold as one bundle at the same total price clear more, because there is one fixed charge instead of three. This calculator works per unit, so test the bundle as a single unit with the combined cost.