On TikTok Shop, tiers determine how much outreach a brand can perform each week. They directly impact how many creators you can contact and which creator segments you can access—making them a critical lever in scaling your affiliate strategy.
How TikTok Shop Tiers Work
TikTok Shop assigns brands to tiers on a weekly basis, every Monday. Your tier is determined by your sales performance during the previous week.
There are four tiers and they correspond to sales thresholds:
- $0 in sales → Tier 0
- Up to $2,000 in sales → Tier 1
- Up to $50,000 in sales → Tier 2
- Above $50,000 in sales → Tier 3
These thresholds have remained unchanged throughout 2025.
What Tiers Actually Limit
Your tier affects outreach in two distinct ways:
- The number of unconnected creators you can contact per week
- The audience size of the creators you are allowed to contact
Unconnected vs. Connected Creators
The first—and often misunderstood—constraint applies only to unconnected creators, not to creators overall.
A creator is considered connected if they have ever:
- Accepted a collaboration invitation, or
- Replied to one of your direct messages
Once a creator is connected, you can invite them to collaborations at any time, without counting against your weekly quota. Your tier therefore limits how many new creators you can initiate contact with each week, not how many total creators you can work with.
Creator Audience Size Limits
The second constraint restricts the follower count of creators you can reach out to.
The key threshold is 20,000 followers. Brands in lower tiers are generally limited to contacting creators below this threshold—typically newer affiliates who are still building their audience and have joined TikTok Shop more recently. As brands move up the tiers, they gain access to more established creators with larger followings.
Where to Track Your Weekly Limits
TikTok Shop provides a dedicated page in the Affiliate Center where brands can review their current quotas and restrictions:
https://affiliate-us.tiktok.com/connection/quota/overview
Here's the table that summarizes the tiers as of Dev 2025. The thresholds have stayed the same throughout 2025.
The Starter Tier
In addition to the standard tiers, TikTok Shop applies a special “Starter” tier to newly onboarded brands with no sales history.
For their first month on the platform, Starter brands are granted the ability to contact up to 1,000 unconnected creators per week, regardless of sales performance. This grace period is designed to help new merchants kickstart their first campaigns and build initial traction.
Moving Up the Tiers
For our clients, the objective is clear: progressively move up the tier ladder.
As we explain in our other posts, scaling sales on TikTok Shop requires a careful balance between:
- Well-structured campaigns, and
- GMV maximization strategies
Because outreach quotas are limited, every creator you contact is a valuable asset. Selecting the right affiliates is therefore essential—and this is where Trendio excels.
Our AI-powered matching algorithm identifies the creators most likely to convert and drive sales for your brand, ensuring that every outreach opportunity is used as efficiently as possible.
About Trendio
Trendio is a video shopping technology provider and agency that works with brands across categories on TikTok Shop, YouTube Shopping and video web embedding. Trendio combines proprietary AI solutions with channel expertise to identify and engage the best affiliate creators for every brand in every channel, manage their entire video creation process, optimize brands' own video posts using video AI, manage paid ads for maximum returns and deliver best-in-class tracking. For more information, visit www.trendio.ai.
About the Author(s)
David Olmos is the Co-Founder and CTO of Trendio. A seasoned entrepreneur, David has founded and held key roles in multiple tech startups in e-commerce, social networks and mobile apps. He holds an MBA from INSEAD and a degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.