TikTok Shop Ads and Product Feed Rebuild for DTC

Where the first two weeks go: In the TikTok Shop accounts I have taken over, somewhere between a fifth and a third of live SKUs were ineligible for Video Shopping Ads and nobody in the business knew. The causes repeat: a category mapped to the wrong node in TikTok's taxonomy, a missing brand field, variant groups sharing a single image, a price that disagrees with the Shop listing after rounding between CZK and EUR. None of this throws an error. Those SKUs fall out of the set the optimiser is allowed to choose from, and the account reads as creative fatigue when the problem is the catalogue. So the feed comes first and the campaigns come second. What the feed work is: I work from the product source, not from the exported file. Shopify, Shoptet and homegrown PIMs all export something TikTok accepts and then ranks badly. Title construction gets rewritten so the first forty characters carry the noun a shopper actually types rather than your internal product name. Category mapping is redone against TikTok's node list instead of the automatic guess. Variant groups get split where the optimiser has been averaging across colours with very different sell-through. A nightly diff runs against the previous export, so a merchandiser renaming a collection does not silently drop three hundred listings on a Friday. The campaign side: GMV Max and manual Product Shopping Ads do not divide the catalogue evenly. I decide which owns which part of it, and I split on contribution margin after commission and returns rather than on revenue. Affiliate overlap is where most sellers lose money without seeing it: TikTok Shop affiliates are already selling your bestsellers at commission, and your paid campaign bids into the same auction for the same viewer. I set the rule for which SKUs are left to affiliates and which are defended with spend, and revisit it monthly, because the answer moves as commission tiers and creator interest move. What is not included: No video production. I brief creative and I reject creative, and I work alongside your editor or the sourcing engagement on this profile, but nothing here includes filming. No affiliate recruitment or creator seeding logistics. No Shop customer service, returns handling, or listing copywriting beyond the fields that affect ad eligibility and ranking. No marketplace expansion advice for Amazon, Allegro or Shopee. Who this is not for: Sellers whose contribution margin after TikTok's commission, affiliate payout, shipping and returns is under roughly twenty-five percent. Paid TikTok Shop will find that ceiling inside the first month and nothing in this engagement moves it. Shops open less than ninety days, because the catalogue has no sell-through history to split on. And brands who want TikTok Shop as an awareness placement, which is a different budget line and a different conversation. How you will see it working: Reporting is at SKU level and in contribution margin, weekly, in your sheet rather than my dashboard. If a decision I made is losing money you see it the same week I do. I will also tell you when the account has reached the point where additional spend is buying the same buyers a second time, and at that point I would rather cut the budget than protect the retainer.