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Learn the top mistakes brands make on TikTok Shop and how to scale without burning budget
TikTok Shop is the fastest-growing e-commerce channel in Southeast Asia. But here’s the catch: most brands that jump in… fail. Not because their products are bad, but because they treat TikTok like every other platform.
At SwingUp, we’ve audited and scaled dozens of accounts, from startups doing ₱100k months to brands chasing ₱50M+. The same mistakes keep showing up. Here are the top TikTok mistakes we see brands make, and how you can avoid them.
Old-school agencies love to copy-paste Meta playbooks onto TikTok. But TikTok isn’t about static targeting, polished creatives, and endless testing. It’s about speed, rawness, and community.
👉 Fix: Start with creator-led videos. Then scale them with GMV Max Ads. TikTok rewards authenticity, not polish.
Too many brands say: “We’re not ready for live yet.” Translation? They’re leaving millions on the table.
Live isn’t optional, it’s TikTok’s growth engine.
👉 Fix: Treat live as core, not extra. Train your sellers to engineer urgency, and sync ads with live schedules.
Some brands think affiliates = freebies. Big mistake. Affiliates are your distributed salesforce.
One brand we handled jumped from ₱4.5M to ₱6.2M affiliate GMV in 30 days, simply by treating affiliates like partners, not random creators.
👉 Fix: Build an affiliate system. Recruit, train, and reward them. Then boost top affiliate videos with GMV Max.
TikTok users don’t “plan purchases.” They impulse buy (most of the time). If your store feels like a catalog, you’ll lose.
👉 Fix: Engineer urgency everywhere — ads, lives, affiliate promos. Buyers need a reason to act now, not “later.”
We’ve met founders who brag about millions of views, while their GMV flatlined. On TikTok, engagement does not always equate with growth.
👉 Fix: Track what matters: GMV, ROAS, CPA, CVR. Everything else is noise.
TikTok Shop is unforgiving if you don’t adapt. The brands that win here understand urgency, lean into affiliates, and let GMV Max do the heavy lifting. The ones that don’t? They’ll keep burning budget, blaming the platform, and wondering why others are scaling past them.
At SwingUp, we’ve turned these mistakes into playbooks, helping brands go from stalled growth to 8-figure GMV months.
👉 Don’t let your TikTok strategy become a cautionary tale. Work with SwingUp and let’s scale your store the right way.
