"TikTok Shop takes 6%" is the right answer for most categories and the wrong one for two carve-outs that a flat-rate summary skips entirely — a flat 5% rate for Jewelry & Pre-Owned, and a genuine tax-bracket-style split for Collectibles that only some guides catch at all.
Three rate structures under one "referral fee" label
| Category group | Structure |
|---|---|
| Most categories (Fashion, Electronics, Beauty, Home, Toys, etc.) | Flat 6% |
| Jewelry & Pre-Owned (bags, watches, footwear, apparel, refurbished electronics, collectible coins/cards/figures/comics) | Flat 5% |
| Collectibles (cultural items, entertainment, sports collectibles, trading cards & accessories) | Tiered: 6% on the first $10,000, 3% on the portion above $10,000 |
Worked example: a Collectibles sale that crosses both tiers
A $15,000 trading-card lot sale: the first $10,000 is charged at 6% ($600), and the remaining $5,000 is charged at 3% ($150) — a total referral fee of $750, a blended rate of exactly 5.0%. Treat it as a flat 6% instead and the fee looks like $900 — a $150 overstatement on a single sale, purely from missing the tier split above $10,000.
Where Jewelry & Pre-Owned and Collectibles happen to agree — and where they don't
At exactly $15,000, Jewelry & Pre-Owned's flat 5% rate and Collectibles' blended tiered rate land on the identical $750 fee — but that's a coincidence of this one sale amount, not a pattern. Below $15,000, Collectibles' blended rate is above 5% (more of the sale sits in the 6% first bracket — at $10,000 exactly, it's still the full 6%). Above $15,000, it drops below 5% and keeps falling toward 3% as the sale grows, while Jewelry & Pre-Owned's flat 5% never moves. Two genuinely different carve-outs, both discounting off the 6% standard rate, but only one of them is actually a flat percentage.
The exclusions, and why each one is deliberately left out
- Fulfilled by TikTok (FBT) fees — TikTok changed its own fulfillment pricing three separate times in the first half of 2026 alone, and publishes the rates only as images, not extractable text. Too volatile and unverifiable to model without risking a stale number.
- Refund Administration Fee — only applies to refunded orders, so it has no place in a completed sale's margin calculation to begin with.
- The 3% new-seller promotional rate — a time-limited, account-specific incentive whose own source page couldn't be reloaded to reconfirm it's still current, so it's excluded rather than risk citing a rate that's since expired.
What this doesn't cover
Referral fee only, for the standard, Jewelry & Pre-Owned, and Collectibles category groups as TikTok Shop's own Seller Center University documents them; any category not itemized in that public schedule defaults to the 6% standard rate here rather than being guessed at individually. Tax and TikTok-funded "Platform Discount" amounts are excluded from the fee base, matching TikTok's own referral-fee formula and this site's treatment of tax elsewhere as a pass-through.