Let me set the scene. Your supplement brand is doing around £2m of net sales a year and TikTok Shop is where most of it happens. Orders are flying, creators are posting, and every week a settlement lands in your account that looks smaller than the sales screen said it should. Here's the question I hear from supplement founders at this size more than any other: what does TikTok Shop actually cost a £2m brand?
Here's the direct answer. The platform itself takes about 10.7% of your revenue before you pay a creator or run a single ad: 9% commission plus the 50p parcel fee, net of the VAT you reclaim. Then budget another 15% to 25% for creators and ads, because on TikTok that is not optional spend, it is the machine that sells the product. Most brands price for the 9% and discover the rest of the stack later.
Here's the Short Version
- No subscription, no listing fee. TikTok Shop makes its money per sale, which sounds friendly until you stack the layers
- Commission is 9% including VAT, and it has been since 2 September 2024 when it rose from 5%. Health products, including supplements, sit at the standard 9% rate. Temporary reductions exist through new-seller offers, Seller Missions and GMV Max savings, but do not build your model on them
- The 9% is charged on the price the customer pays, VAT included. One sixth of every fee charge is VAT you reclaim if you're registered, so the fee nets to 7.5% of the customer price
- No separate card processing percentage on UK orders. The commission covers it
- Self-fulfil and you pay 50p including VAT per delivered parcel. At 80,000 orders a year that is £40,000 of charges
- Creators are where the stack grows. Start around 10% commission and tier up to 20% for your best performers, all on top of the platform's 9%
- Budget the stack, not the headline. In the worked example below, platform costs are 10.7% of net revenue, fulfilment 8% and marketing 17.5%: 36.2% gone before overheads, 43.7% if marketing hits 25%
What Platform Fees Does TikTok Shop Actually Charge?
Two platform charges drive this worked model: the standard commission, and the 50p Shipped-by-Seller fee if you fulfil your own orders. Everything else is an optional service you switch on, exactly why founders underestimate the platform and overestimate their margin.
First, the commission: 9% including VAT for Health products, which is where supplements sit, unchanged since 2 September 2024 when it rose from 5%. Eligible electrical goods and selected beauty and personal care lines carry a 5% category rate, and TikTok runs temporary seller-wide reductions through new-seller offers, Seller Missions and GMV Max savings. None of that changes the planning number for a supplement brand: build your model on 9% and treat any reduction as a bonus.
Second, the parcel fee: 50p including VAT on every delivered parcel when you fulfil your own orders, which TikTok calls Shipped by Seller. It is charged when the parcel is delivered, not when the order is placed. Send 80,000 parcels a year and that line is £40,000 before you recover the VAT in it. We wrote the bookkeeping version in our post on TikTok Shop fees UK sellers actually pay and how to reconcile them.
Beyond those two, there is no separate card processing percentage on UK orders, no monthly subscription and no listing fee. Articles online will tell you there's a 2% or 3% transaction fee on top. There isn't, in the UK: that structure is American and gets copy pasted around the internet. Other charges apply only when you trigger them: the ads and promotions later in this post, TikTok's fulfilment, or a £3.50 courier handling fee, excluding VAT, for misdeclared parcels since August 2026. If your settlement shows a charge you don't recognise, check the Seller Centre before you reprice.
What Is the Commission Actually Calculated On?
TikTok works the commission on the net sale: the product price plus any shipping the customer paid, less refunds, with any platform-funded discount added back into the base. Seller-funded discounts shrink the base to the price the customer pays. In the UK the customer price includes VAT, so the commission base is VAT inclusive.
Take a £30 pot of vitamins, a realistic price for a month's supply. The customer pays £30 and £5 of that is output VAT that was never yours. TikTok charges 9% of £30, which is £2.70, and that £2.70 includes VAT too: £2.25 is the fee and 45p is input VAT. If you're VAT registered on the standard scheme you reclaim the 45p, so the fee genuinely costs £2.25, which is 7.5% of the customer price, or 9% of your net revenue once the VAT is stripped out of the sale. Fee VAT you never reclaim is fees paid twice, a mistake we see constantly in this industry's books. Our TikTok Shop VAT checklist shows where the reclaimable VAT hides in a settlement.
Two consequences follow. First, book the sale gross at what the customer paid and show the fees as costs. Book the net settlement as revenue and the fee never appears as a cost, so the P&L flatters you. Second, seller-funded vouchers come out of your pocket before commission is calculated, because the base is the discounted price. Platform-funded discounts are different: TikTok writes those back into the fee base, so commission lands on the full price. That discount is effectively shared, not free.
Where Do Creators and Affiliates Sit in the Stack?
The platform's 9% is the entry ticket. The creators are the performers, and they are paid out of your price before you see a penny.
Creator and affiliate commission is set by you, and it applies only to qualifying sales the platform attributes to that creator's content. In practice you will not run a supplement brand without it: affiliate content is how TikTok finds buyers. TikTok suggests starting around 10% when you have no benchmark, and the right rate depends on your margin and how well the creator performs. A sensible ladder starts at 10% for general creators, moves to 15% for proven sellers and up to 20% for top performers, reviewed monthly.
Here's the arithmetic that surprises founders. If 60% of your orders carry a 15% creator commission, that is 9% of total revenue going to creators before you have spent a pound on ads. Stack it on the platform's 9% and you're at 18% of revenue before cost of goods, fulfilment or overheads. We covered this layer in our post on how a 7-figure supplement brand should structure their P&L: creator payouts are marketing, not cost of goods; burying them in COGS hides which channel pays.
TikTok also runs co-funded promotion programmes where the platform chips in towards creator commission or ad costs. They come and go, so treat them as a bonus, never part of the model. And the quiet costs: samples to creators and the shipping on them. Treat them as marketing in your own P&L, because that is what they are doing.
What Does Advertising Add on Top?
Creator commission gets you distribution. Advertising gets you scale, and it sits on top of everything so far. TikTok Shop ads now run through GMV Max: you set a daily budget and a target return on ad spend, and TikTok optimises delivery against it. You pay for ad delivery, not only for completed sales, and there is no reliable published benchmark for what a sale should cost. Set the budget from your own contribution margin, and measure what your ads deliver before scaling them.
Then there is Smart Promotion, which sellers constantly confuse with advertising. It is not GMV Max. It is TikTok's promotion programme for eligible sellers, allocating product vouchers, direct discounts and shipping promotions on your behalf, for a variable fee of 0.5% to 5% of your shop's total GMV, rising to as much as 6% during campaign periods. It is opt-in, but the fee lands on top of your commission whichever way you join, so read the rate in Seller Centre before you enrol. There is no blanket margin rule for whether it pays: test it on a defined set of products and measure what it drives. We wrote the wider version in our post on net profit versus ROAS, because TikTok is where brands confuse a great ROAS with a terrible profit.
How Do Refunds and Returns Change the Bill?
Supplements are consumables, but refunds still move the fee maths. Use your own return rate, not a category benchmark.
First, refunds come out of the commission base. The commission is calculated on sales net of refunds, so when an order is refunded, the commission on it is reversed. You don't pay 9% on sales that didn't stick. Second, the parcel fee is charged per delivered parcel, so a parcel that goes out and comes back has still cost you your 50p. Third, the refund is a cash flow event: TikTok settles you net, so the refund comes out of your next settlement rather than you paying it separately.
The discipline that saves supplement brands is a monthly reconciliation of gross sales, refunds, fees and net settlements, which is exactly what our post on why TikTok Shop brands fail at reconciliation covers. If you can't explain every pound of difference between your dashboard and your bank account, you can't tell whether your fee stack is 10% or 14%.
What About Fulfilled by TikTok?
You have three fulfilment choices. Shipped by Seller, where you or your 3PL sends parcels and you pay 50p per delivered parcel. Shipped via Platform, where you pack the order and buy TikTok's carrier service. And Fulfilled by TikTok, TikTok's warehouse service, which stores, picks, packs and ships. FBT and Shipped via Platform do not pay the 50p fee, but they carry their own charges.
On the current FBT rate card you pay an operations fee per item by size: 78p for the smallest parcels, £1.08 for small, £1.80 for medium, more for large. Storage is free for the first 60 days, then tiered daily rates apply from day 61, roughly £1.08 to £4.17 per cubic metre per day in low season and £1.39 to £5.43 in peak. Shipping is where the shape gets interesting. Under standard FBT the buyer normally pays £3.99 below £22; on eligible orders of £22 and above you pay £1.99 and the buyer ships free. A Value+ option costs you £1.79 per parcel and the buyer ships free at any order value. Rate cards refresh, so check the current one in Seller Centre before you model it.
For a supplement brand the choice usually comes down to order value. Pots of vitamins suit TikTok's smallest tiers, and above £22 FBT's free shipping for buyers is a genuine conversion lever. Below £22 the buyer carries the £3.99 under standard FBT, so your 3PL plus the 50p fee often wins. Model both with your real order mix before you decide.
When Does the Money Actually Land?
The last layer is invisible on a fee schedule, and it's the one that bites supplement brands hardest: timing. TikTok Shop settles from the delivery date, and your settlement period depends on your seller status, performance and risk, not on how fast you posted the parcel. Introductory sellers wait 31 days, standard is 8, accelerated 3, express 1. TikTok can hold a reserve for up to 30 calendar days on top, and the bank transfer usually takes another three business days.
At £2m of net sales your takings run at about £200,000 a month including VAT. On an 8 day settlement cycle roughly £50,000 of that sits in TikTok's pipeline at any moment; on the 31 day introductory cycle it is the best part of £200,000, which is how a new shop can be profitable on paper and skint in the bank at the same time. Refunds yet to land and creator commissions yet to be charged widen the gap further. This is why fast growing TikTok brands run out of cash while showing a profit: the fees are real, the timing is delayed, the reserves are out of your control. Our post on scaling a TikTok Shop without running out of cash is the practical version, and if you've been profitable and broke at once, our piece on the cash gap explains why.
Illustrative Example: The Full Cost Stack at £2m
Here is the whole stack in one table. Every figure is an illustrative example with synthetic numbers, built to show the shape and the arithmetic. It is not a client, and your mix will differ. The assumptions: a supplement brand selling entirely through TikTok Shop, taking £2.4m a year including VAT, which is £2m of net revenue once the 20% output VAT on supplements is stripped out, at 80,000 orders with a £30 average including VAT and no separate shipping charge. It fulfils from its own 3PL, pays creators on 60% of orders at an average 12.5%, and spends 10% of net revenue on TikTok ads. Fee lines are shown net of the input VAT a registered seller reclaims.
| Line | Amount | Share of revenue |
|---|---|---|
| Customer takings, VAT included | £2,400,000 | |
| Output VAT at 20% | (£400,000) | |
| Revenue, net of VAT | £2,000,000 | 100% |
| Cost of goods sold | (£560,000) | 28% |
| Gross profit | £1,440,000 | 72% |
| TikTok commission: 9% incl VAT, £216,000 charged, £36,000 VAT reclaimed | (£180,000) | 9% |
| TikTok parcel fees: 50p on 80,000 parcels, £40,000 charged, £6,667 VAT reclaimed | (£33,333) | 1.7% |
| Fulfilment through 3PL at £2 per parcel | (£160,000) | 8% |
| Creator commissions: 60% of orders at 12.5% | (£150,000) | 7.5% |
| TikTok advertising | (£200,000) | 10% |
| Contribution before overheads | £716,667 | 35.8% |
Read it top to bottom and the story is stark. A 72% gross margin is this example's assumption, and it is the kind of margin a supplement brand needs to survive this stack: cheap to make, expensive to sell. Then the stack gets to work. The platform alone takes £213,333 net, 10.7% of revenue, before a parcel is picked. Fulfilment takes £160,000. Creators and ads take £350,000 between them. By the time the product is made, sold, shipped and marketed, £1,283,333 has gone and £716,667 is left, 35.8%, to pay the people, the founder, the compliance and the insurance. Take £350,000 of overheads off that and EBITDA is £366,667, 18.3% of revenue, a level most TikTok-first brands would take.
Push total marketing, creators and ads together, to 25% of net revenue and the contribution falls to £566,667, 28.3%. That is the real cost stack, and it is why we built the TikTok Shop profit calculator: so you can put your own numbers in before you commit to a pricing structure, not after a quarter of settlement surprises.
FAQ
Is the commission really 9% for supplements, or is there a lower rate for health products?
Plan on 9% including VAT. Health products, including supplements, sit at the standard 9% rate. Selected electrical and beauty lines can carry 5%, and TikTok runs temporary seller-wide reductions through new-seller offers, Seller Missions and GMV Max savings. If one applies to you, it will show in Seller Centre: screenshot it, because the programmes change without ceremony.
Can I just add the fees onto my prices?
Only if you do the maths properly. A 9% commission means you keep 91p of every pound, so to stand still after the fee you need prices about 9.9% higher, not 9%. And your price sits next to competing brands that have done their own maths, so the fee comes out of your margin, not just your price tag. Supplements are standard rated for VAT at 20%, which makes the arithmetic less forgiving; our guide to VAT for ecommerce brands growing past the threshold covers marketplace selling.
Why is my settlement smaller than my sales dashboard?
Because the settlement is net and the dashboard is gross. Commission, parcel fees, refunds and any reserve come out before the money moves, and settlements only cover orders past their delivery window. The fix is a monthly bridge from gross sales to net cash, which is where most TikTok Shop brands quietly lose the plot.
Do I pay commission on refunded orders?
No. The commission base is net of refunds, so the commission on a refunded order is reversed. The 50p parcel fee is different: it is charged per delivered parcel, so a returned order has still cost you the fee for the delivery that happened.
The Bottom Line
A £2m supplement brand on TikTok Shop is not paying 9%. In the worked example above, the layers beyond the headline add another 27.2 points, taking the selling and fulfilment stack to 36.2% of net revenue before a single overhead. The brands that survive treat the fee structure as a pricing input, not an afterthought: they know their net revenue, they reclaim the VAT on their fees, they reconcile every settlement, and they budget marketing as a selling cost in their contribution model, not as inventory or COGS. The 9% is not the problem. Not knowing what comes after it is.
If you'd like us to map your actual settlement history against this stack, that's what we do. We're specialist social commerce accountants, we work with UK ecommerce brands from £1m to £20m, and we see TikTok Shop settlements every day. Book a call and we'll show you where your fees are actually going.