Highway to TikTok Shop:
Breaking Down the Barriers to Creators Reach

TikTok Shop is the most powerful ecommerce growth engine in the U.S. today. With Gross Merchandise Value reaching an estimated $9B in 2024 and projections of $17B in 2025, the platform is transforming how consumers discover and purchase products. And yet for many brands—particularly smaller ones—entering TikTok Shop feels like stepping into a maze.

While operational challenges like unexpected violations or shifting rules can trip up new sellers, the biggest barrier by far is affiliate reach: without the right creators, performance simply doesn’t happen—and the structural barriers to reaching the right number and quality of affiliates are nothing short of daunting.

At Trendio, we’ve experienced these challenges firsthand and built technology specifically to eliminate them. Our goal is simple: make TikTok Shop work for every brand, not just the established ones. Below, we outline the hidden constraints that limit brand affiliate outreach on TikTok Shop—and how we’ve engineered our platform to break through each of them.

The Hidden Barriers to Affiliate Reach

TikTok Shop holds enormous promise—but for new entrants, unlocking that opportunity isn’t always straightforward. Beyond early operational hurdles, the biggest bottleneck is often connecting with the right affiliates who can help your brand grow. And unfortunately for smaller or newer brands, the path to affiliate engagement is full of friction that can feel impossible to overcome.

First, TikTok’s tiering system dictates how many—and which—affiliates a seller can invite. Unless an affiliate is in your tier or initiates contact (a rare event for new brands), they’re simply off-limits. Exhibit 1 below outlines these constraints.

For example, a seller who just launched on the platform cannot invite any affiliates at all. Even after gaining some traction, early-stage brands remain restricted from reaching creators with more than 20,000 followers—limiting growth just as momentum begins to build. It’s a classic catch-22: you need affiliates to grow, but you can’t access them until you’ve already grown.

Second, even for more established brands, reaching the right creators remains a challenge. TikTok’s affiliate discovery interface shows only the top 500 results for any given query. Yes, you can tweak the filters—but eventually, you hit a wall. The same affiliates surface again and again, while better-performing, better-fitting creators remain buried.

Third, once you invite an affiliate to collaborate on a product, TikTok Shop locks that invite. Whether or not the affiliate sees it, you can’t re-invite them until the current campaign ends. For brands trying to operate with speed and precision, this restriction severely limits their ability to adapt or re-engage top-tier creators at the right moment.

The result: affiliate reach is capped, discovery is throttled, and high-potential collaborations never get off the ground.

What We’ve Built at Trendio

We’ve built infrastructure to eliminate these barriers—seamlessly and in full compliance with TikTok Shop’s guidelines. Here’s how we help brands expand their affiliate reach, unlock hidden potential, and scale faster:

1. Turn “Out-of-Tier” Into Reachable

TikTok’s tiering rules block outreach to many valuable creators. Unless they initiate contact, sellers are confined to their own tier—a hard ceiling for early-stage brands.

Trendio removes that constraint through a compliant two-step invitation system. We maintain an exclusive database of affiliate email addresses and use it to send invitations outside of TikTok’s direct system. When a creator accepts, that action counts as them “initiating contact,” unlocking the door for a compliant TikTok Shop invite. From the brand’s point of view, it’s seamless: they configure a campaign in Trendio, and we fill it—directly for in-tier affiliates and indirectly (but compliantly) for out-of-tier ones.

This breakthrough makes the platform fully accessible from day one.

2. Go Beyond the Visible Few

TikTok’s internal search surfaces just a fraction of the 2M+ active affiliates on the platform. Trendio doesn’t stop at 500 results—we query the full universe of creators.

Our AI-powered matching engine evaluates each campaign against the full creator database, scoring affiliates by likelihood to engage and likelihood to perform. And because we’ve implemented a multi-arm bandit algorithm, the system continuously tests and rotates new creators into the mix—ensuring no high-fit match gets left behind.

The result is deeper reach, better matches, and higher odds of affiliate-driven sales.

3. Re-Engage Creators at the Right Time

TikTok Shop campaigns are designed to run long enough for creators to earn commissions. But during that time, brands are unable to send new invites to the same affiliate—even if they missed the first one entirely.

Trendio fixes this by dynamically monitoring affiliate engagement. If a creator hasn’t responded and falls below a set probability threshold, we remove them from the active campaign—reopening the opportunity to re-invite them later when timing is better. This simple innovation unlocks second chances with high-quality creators who might otherwise be lost.

The Result: Scaled, Predictable Growth

Our clients don’t worry about finding the right creators or getting trapped in TikTok’s platform limitations. They focus on product, content, and growth—while we power the system that makes that growth possible.

With Trendio, brands don’t just access TikTok Shop—they scale on it, predictably and at speed, by breaking through the barriers that hold most sellers back.