Inventory Syncing Opens up a New Revenue Stream for Shops
With the introduction of TikTok Shop, CommentSold partnered with TikTok to introduce live-selling to their US user base. Adding TikTok as a streaming channel opened up a completely new revenue stream. To accomplish this successfully, TikTok collaborated with CommentSold to provide APIs for syncing product inventory between the two systems. This allowed shops to maintain their core experience and manage their inventory, orders, and fulfillment in one centralized environment.
The Opportunity: Capitalize on Rising Social Media Channel
74%
Discover new brands and products on TikTok
3 in 4
Are likely to buy something while using TikTok.
83%
Say that TikTok plays a role in purchase decisions
78%
Purchased a product after seeing it on TikTok
TikTok is now the most downloaded app of all time, with over 3 billion downloads. In 2023 alone, TikTok projected a 4x growth in its prior year GMV to the tune of $20 billion in sales. Without argument, TikTok is a viable source for new users with predictable purchasing patterns influenced by the platform.
Goals
Our goal was three-fold:
1
Create a seamless account setup between CommentSold and TikTok
2
Automate inventory syncing
3
Give shops the capability to simultaneously stream to multiple channels, adding TikTok
Helping Users Find Their Way
Because this was a new integration, I needed to map out exactly how users would approach setting up their accounts, connecting them, and livestreaming with a new channel. We had plenty of other social media channels available to integrate with, so what made TikTok a more challenging platform to get started with?
Meet Shannon.
Shannon is a seasoned CommentSold user and knows the ins and outs of the platform. She’s recently started creating short content clips on TikTok promoting her store and inventory. She’s one of the first shops asked to help CommentSold pilot features for their new partnership with TikTok.
Easing the Strain of Setup
In order for a business to sell on TikTok, it requires them to have:
A TikTok account, that is converted into a Business/Creator account
A TikTok Shop account
Inventory that meets TikTok eligibility
Each shop would go through a probationary selling period, and every inventory item would be evaluated to meet requirements.
Connecting TikTok accounts to CommentSold
While we couldn’t do much to circumnavigate the need to authorize and connect accounts, we could make the rest of their setup experience easier.
Key Feature: Automatic Syncing
To help ease the strain of setup, we launched automatic syncing of inventory so users don’t have to manually select individual products to add to TikTok.
Automatic syncing for TikTok products
Shannon was about to slap us silly after all those account authorizations, but seeing that we automatically sync her products for her frees up her afternoon.
1,2,3… We're Live
In addition to inventory synchronization, we also added TikTok as a new stream source in our broadcasting interface. Due to technical constraints, I needed to figure out how to merge two video streams into a single session, while making minimal changes to the rest of the interface.
Setting up your broadcast
Key Features
Product Eligibility
Shops curate product selections for their live sales. When they go to set up their stream and select their channels, if they select TikTok as one of the sales channels and their product selection has inventory eligible to be sold on TikTok, we display a badge on approved products.
Shannon isn’t always the one presenting on her live sales. Having the product eligibility within the upcoming product selection on the broadcasting dashboard helps her models and hosts know how to present the product and pivot their delivery accordingly. Happy host, happy shoppers, happy Shannon.
Flexible Interface
The setup for stores' live shows can differ. Some use just a phone and laptop, while others have setups similar to production studios. We gave them the ability to arrange the layout of their video streams on their dashboard.
Challenges
1
Ambiguity
Teams were working in tandem with TikTok as they were developing their APIs. Several times we had to revisit solutions in order to comply with API designs.
2
testing access
Because shopping via TikTok was not available in the US yet, sandboxes and access were difficult to get for engineers and QA to test API responses.
3
bungled code
The broadcast interface, as the engineering team put it, was held together with “sticks and glue” and was extremely fragile to modify.
Impact
Partnering with TikTok had been years in the making, and an overdue request from our shops looking to expand their customer reach. Within a few months of public release, CommentSold saw 10% of GMV attributed to TikTok.
Future Steps
Much of our roadmap was determined by a point system developed by TikTok that ranked the level of importance for each feature – we consistently were balancing improvements alongside these new features.
We were in the process of designing support for product certification, when unfortunately I was a part of a RIF.
Learnings
Learning the importance of a well structured and designed API was crucial not only for the engineering team, but for myself as well. Because of the complexity of the API, this increased the number of potential user flows and edge cases a user might find themselves in.
Kristin Ferrari © 2025