Our best product ideas come directly from conversations with our clients. One recurring theme kept surfacing: brands were overwhelmed by the volume of manual operations in TikTok Shop Seller Center.

To successfully scale on TikTok Shop, sellers must manage a wide range of time-consuming tasks, including:

• Requesting Spark codes from creators, storing them, and activating them in paid campaigns
• Approving sample requests
• Responding thoughtfully to every creator message—questions about commissions, sample shipments, content requirements, and campaign status
• Creating and monitoring Target campaigns on a daily basis
• Sending segmented communications to creators to optimize incentives and performance

Most of these workflows can—and must—be automated to operate at scale. Without automation, teams quickly become buried under operational load.

AI Agents Built for Scale

At Trendio, we have built a suite of AI Agents designed to handle these operational tasks end-to-end. At the core of this system is our Message Center, our flagship AI Agent.

The Trendio Message Center centralizes all creator communications that are normally accessed through TikTok Shop’s “Creator Messages” page. Incidentally, this feature in TikTok Shop is quite basic, creating a clear opportunity for us to add meaningful value.

In TikTok Shop, brands can view conversations, reply, and apply basic filters. We took this foundation and expanded it dramatically.

The Message Center—On Steroids

In Trendio’s Message Center, brands can:

• Filter conversations by date, sentiment, or creator
• Sort messages by date, sentiment, or status
• Let our AI Agent automatically reply to creator inquiries
• Switch any conversation to manual mode, ensuring a human team member takes over
• Mark conversations as read or unread
• Filter conversations using custom hashtags

As a result, Trendio reduces the time brands spend responding to creators by up to 95%.

With every interaction, our AI Agent continuously learns—identifying recurring questions and refining the most effective responses. When a brand joins Trendio, we also analyze their historical creator conversations to ensure responses are accurate, consistent, and aligned with their existing tone and policies from day one.

Supported TikTok Shop Message Types

TikTok Shop currently supports several types of direct messages:

• Text
• Images
• Product cards
• Target collaboration invitation cards
• Sample cards
• crm_text_response
• crm_text_with_image_response

Text, image, CRM text, and CRM text-with-image messages are fully supported in the Trendio Message Center today. Product cards and collaboration invitations are currently displayed with direct links to Seller Center for full details, with full native support coming soon. Notification-only messages are intentionally excluded, as they are not actionable outside of TikTok Shop.

Sentiment Analysis: Proactive Creator Care

One of the most impactful features for our clients is sentiment analysis.

Our AI Agents analyze every incoming creator message and determine the creator’s underlying sentiment. This allows brands to instantly identify creators who may be frustrated or dissatisfied and proactively move those conversations into manual mode for personalized handling. In many cases, our AI Agent already resolves the issue effectively—confirming both accurate sentiment detection and high-quality automated responses.

Hashtags: Turning Conversations into Strategy

Another highly valued feature is conversation hashtags.

Brands can define custom hashtags to track specific topics across all creator conversations. For example, creating a “#christmas” hashtag allows teams to instantly surface all related discussions. This becomes a powerful marketing and operations tool: brands can encourage creators to use specific hashtags, launch challenges or contests, and track engagement and performance across campaigns—all directly from the Message Center.

Built for the TikTok Shop Ecosystem

Sentiment analysis and hashtag-based conversation tracking are exclusive to Trendio. TikTok Shop is a rapidly evolving ecosystem, and it enables partners like Trendio to build advanced, creative tools that go far beyond native functionality.

We are proud to contribute to that ecosystem—and excited to keep sharing innovations that help brands operate smarter, faster, and at scale.