Sellers can offer free product samples to creators so they can test, review, and create engaging content designed to generate more sales. Sellers can manage and track the entire free sample journey from sample management, approving and rejecting requests, shipping samples, reviewing and tracking content posted with samples, and more. What are Free Samples
Seller benefits of free samples
- Easy sample management: Manage and track the entire Free Sample journey from sample posting, creator requests, sample fulfillment, content tracking, and creator and content performance.
- Access top creators, content, and users that fit your brand: You’ll have access to high-performing creators, content creation requirements, and personalized creator recommendations all inside our Affiliate Center.
Note: You must be part of the Affiliate program in order to offer free samples. What are Free Samples
Free Samples: The BasicsStep 1: Set up an Open or Target collaboration with free samples.
- For Open Collaborations, start in the Affiliate marketing Center and click on Open collaboration. Select the product(s) you’d like to offer. Then turn on the Offer free samples toggle, select the sample quantity, how long you’d like to allow for sample requests, and a creator threshold.
- For Target Collaborations, start in the Affiliate Center and click on Target Collaboration. Press Invite to collaborate. In the Target Collaboration creation flow, turn on the Free sample available toggle and select whether you want to manually or automatically approve sample requests from these Target Invite creators.
Step 2: Approve or reject sample requests from creators.
- On the Sample Request Page, you can view creators’ requests along with the requesting creators’ metrics like Followers, Fulfillment, Sales Volume and Average videos per video. You can then approve or reject free sample requests from creators.
- Keep in mind that a product’s free sample quota is reduced on a per-approval basis, meaning that once you approve a creator’s single free sample request, that sample’s inventory is reduced by 1.
Step 3: Ship free samples to creators.
- In the Ready to Ship tab, click Ship in Seller Center to navigate to the Seller Center and ship the sample.
- Once you’re in the Seller Center, click Create labels to purchase shipping labels from TikTok or press Add tracking info if you’ve purchased shipping labels from third parties.
Free Samples: Step-by-Step InstructionsStep 1A: For Open Collaborations, add the “Free Sample” option to your Open Collaboration
There are two ways to add free samples in Open collaboration. Choose the method that works best for you.
Option 1: Add products by navigating to the “Not added” tab on the Open Collaboration page.
- Select the products you want to add to the Open Collaboration
- Click Batch Add to open the collaboration
- Turn on the Offer free samples toggle
- Choose the number of samples you want to offer
- Optional: Set a request period (period for when creators can apply for samples) and set minimum threshold criteria for creators who can apply for a sample (i.e. Minimum follower count, sales volume, sample content fulfillment rate, and/or e-commerce content volume threshold)
- Click Apply to [number] products
Option 2: For products already added to your Open collaboration in the “Added products” tab, add samples for multiple products at once or for products individually.
- To add samples of multiple products: Select multiple products and click Batch free sample
- To add samples of a single product: Select Not created
- Turn on the Offer free samples toggle and set the number of samples for the product(s)
- Optional: Set a request period (time period for when creators can apply for samples) and set minimum threshold criteria for creators who can apply for a sample (i.e. Minimum follower count, sales volume, product categories that creators are associated with promoting, and/or ecommerce content volume threshold)
- Click Apply to [number] products
Once your free sample Open Collaboration is in effect, creators will see an application button for free samples in the product marketplace.
Step 1B: For Target Collaborations, Turn on the Free Sample Toggle
- Turn on the Free sample available toggle.
- Select whether you want to manually or automatically approve free sample requests. If you select automatic approval, sample requests will be automatically moved to the Ready to Ship tab in the Sample Requests page. Only sample requests for the creators in this Target Collaboration will be automatically approved.
- To edit an existing Target Collaboration and add free samples, navigate to the Target collaborations tab, select the specific Collaboration and click edit.
- You’ll be taken into the Edit Invitation view, where you can set up free samples and decide whether to manually or automatically approve sample requests. Once toggled on, invited creators can request a free sample of every product in the Target Invitation, including variations.
Step 2: Approve, Reject, and Manage Free Sample Requests
After creators submit requests for free samples, you’ll receive all requests on the Sample Requests page of the Affiliate Center to manage.
- All requests are to be reviewed within seven (7) days or the requests will be automatically canceled.
- The To Review tab includes all requests to be reviewed, approved, or rejected. You can view details of creators in this section including name, follower count, and more details.
- Here, you can also filterapplications for specific criteria to more easily find the creators you would like to approve for samples.
- You can filter based on four categories:
- Creators
- Product category: Select creators who generated revenue or promoted products in selected categories
- Follower count: Select creators based their follower tier
- Content type: Select creators who create video or LIVE content, or both
- Creator agency: Select creators managed by an agency or independent creators
- Fulfillment Rate: Select creators with a ‘Ok’, ‘Good’, or ‘Better’ sample content fulfillment rate, based on their historical posting rates
- Past collaborations: Only show creators who generate sales with your products
- Followers
- Follower age: Select creators who have a high share of followers in the selected age demographic
- Follower gender: Select creators who have a majority male or female followers
- Performance
- GMV: Select creators with revenue from LIVE, shoppable video or showcase in the last 30 days
- Average views per video: Select creators based on the average number of views per video
- Turn on the toggle if you want to search for creators whose shoppable videos meet this criteria
- Average viewers per LIVE: Select creators based on the average number of viewers per LIVE
- Turn on the toggle if you want to search for creators whose shoppable LIVE videos meet this criteria
- Sample requests
- Expiring within 1-3 days: Select creators who have sample requests that will expire within 1-3 days
- From reliable creators: Select creators who are in the top 20% of creators, based on the ratio of received free samples and posted content.
- Rejected within 30 days: Select creators whose requests were rejected within the last 30 days
- Rejected requests will be moved to the Cancelled tab
- Approved requests will move to the Ready to Ship tab
- When a request is approved, a pop-up will let you know whether the sample request was approved successfully or not. In cases when the request is not approved, it will be due to an error, such as:
- Insufficient quantity of samples available
- Insufficient quantity of product in stock
- In the pop-up window, you’ll be prompted to go to the Seller Center to ship the sample. To learn more about how to ship your samples from the Seller Center, refer to our guide on Shipping Solutions.
Step 3: Ship the Free Samples
Once you’ve approved any free sample requests, the samples need to be shipped within seven (7) days of the approval. If not, requests will be automatically canceled.
- In Affiliate Center, go to Sample Requests and click on Ready to Ship. Under Awaiting Shipment, you’ll see all orders that need to be shipped.
- You can fulfill shipments individually (one product per creator) or in batches (if you have approved one creator to receive multiple product samples).
- From there, you can arrange a shipment to be fulfilled in the Seller Center.
- You’ll be navigated to the Seller Center, where you can ship the samples either by:
- Clicking Create labels to purchase shipping labels from TikTok, or
- Clicking Add tracking info if you’ve purchased shipping labels from third parties.
- Note that free samples will be shown with a Free sample tag.
Step 4: Monitor creator content creation and marketing of free samples
Once free samples are delivered, sellers can track and monitor the promotional content that is being created.
- Creators are required to create content within 14 days of receiving the sample
- Once a creator has completed their content creation, their request will move to the “Completed” tab in Seller Center and “Content pending” tab in the Affiliate Center.
- After the creator posts their promotional content, their request will move to the “Completed” tab.
- The seller can click “View performance” on the right side of the request row under the “Completed” tab to view the performance information and data.
Step 5: Analyze creator and content performance
Once a sample request is completed, Sellers can go to View Content to see how their free sample product content performed.
- Sellers can view Video and LIVE content performance, including the content itself, publish time, content views, likes, comments, and number of orders generated from the content.
Bulk Edit Free Sample Rules
Sellers who manage large catalogs can edit their free sample rules at scale with Bulk Edit inOpen Collaboration. Here, you can download and upload your catalogs as flat files (.CSV, .XLS, .TXT) in order to update sample rules, set up and remove free samples for SKUs.
Step 1: Navigate to Open Collaboration and click ‘Bulk edit’Step 2: Download your products as a template for future uploads
- The flat file will contain the following locked column labels:
- Product name, product ID, product category, estimated commission, sample obtained, creator showcase, creator posted, enable sample, sample quantity, request period start, request period end, follower threshold, 30 days sales volume, and 30 days e-commerce content number
- Specific rows and columns will be locked to minimize data entry errors and upload failure. For instance, where product status is “unavailable”, that row will be locked
Step 3: Update sample rules in the template
For each sample in a row of the flat file, you can modify your sample rules within the following parameters to make changes to your sample rules:
- Enable sample
- Values drop down
- Sample quantity
- Acceptable values: # 1 – 9999
- Request period start
- Acceptable values: date (mm/dd/yyyy)
- No termination date = null
- Request period end
- Acceptable values: date (mm/dd/yyyy)
- No termination date = null
- Commission Rate
- Creator Product Category
- Acceptable values: located in drop down OR null
- 30 days sales volume
- Available in drop down
- 30 days e-commerce content number
- Available in drop down
- Fulfillment Rate
- Drop down locked values
Step 4: Upload your updated template in Bulk edit
- You can drag and drop or select the template from your files.
- You’ll see the status of your upload via text within the flat file module.
Upload Success
- You can then see how many SKUs were successfully uploaded.
UploadFailure
- Within the UI module, you can see how many SKUs failed to upload.
- You can click download failed results for a list of SKUs with failed uploads.
FAQs
- Who can apply for free samples?
- Any creator in TikTok Shop can apply for free samples (5K+ followers).
- How many free samples can a creator receive?
- Less than $5K monthly GMV: Up to 5 samples
- $5K-$150K monthly GMV: Up to 20 samples
- More than $150K monthly GMV: Up to 50 samples
- Can creators request more than one sample of the same product?
- Creators can only request one sample of a specific product from a single seller. However, they can request more free samples of other products (up to the limits listed in the previous question).
- Will sellers be reminded of pending free sample requests?
- TikTok Shop will send an email reminding sellers to review pending free sample requests.
- How can I approve or reject free sample requests in bulk?
- Step 1: Filter creator requests according to specific tags (number of fans, creator tags, etc.)
- Step 2: After filtering for creators, click “Select all” to approve or reject in batches.
- If for some reason the creator cannot fulfill the free sample content requirement, what will happen？
- Creators may not be able to fulfill sample content requirements for the following reasons (and the sample request will be cancelled):
- The seller account has been closed
- The seller has been banned from TikTok Shop
- The product has been banned from TikTok Shop
- The seller is forever banned from working with affiliates
- The collaboration has been deleted
- Note: In these instances, the system will automatically cancel any requests and creators will not be required to fulfill their sample content requirements.
- In other instances, creators may not be able to fulfill their sample content requirements for the following reasons (and their fulfillment requirements will be paused):
- The product has been deleted
- The product has been inactivated
- The product is under review
- The product is sold out
- Note: If the product is sold out, the system will pause requirements in the short term until the product status returns to active.
- The seller will also receive a notification on the Affiliate homepage of the suspended fulfillment.
- How do sellers change the product status back to active？
- Product deleted: Go to Seller Center -> Manage products -> Deleted tab -> Recover this product
- Product inactivated: Go to Seller Center -> Manage products-> Inactive tab -> Check inactive reason and activate the product
- Product under review: Wait until it passes platform review
Sold out: Add more inventory in Seller Center
