From 3 August 2026, TikTok Shop Vietnam formally applied a new platform commission schedule for Mall sellers. This is one of the year’s most consequential adjustments for brands trading on the platform, particularly in categories such as cosmetics, personal care, health and fashion.
According to TikTok Shop’s announcement and the documents cross-checked by the press, commission rates in many category groups have risen considerably.
In the Beauty & Personal Care group, commission can reach 19.8%. The Health group ranges from 16% to 18.8%. Many Fashion and Footwear subcategories have been adjusted to around 16–17.1%, while some categories under Home & Living carry rates as high as 18.1%.
Alongside the platform commission, sellers must still pay a 6% transaction fee and 3,000 dong for each successfully delivered order. These are only the basic charges, and do not include advertising, affiliate, co-funded vouchers, promotions, returns or other operating costs.
For many products this means that platform costs alone already account for a very large share of the selling price.
The worry is not the rise in fees
The greater worry is that a great many sellers today do not really know how much they make on each order.
In practice, plenty of businesses still build their prices on a fairly simple formula:
Cost price + operating cost + an expected profit percentage.
Advertising and affiliate budgets are then added if needed.
This model worked well while platform costs were low. But as TikTok Shop has kept adjusting its fee schedule recently, the profit calculation has become a great deal more complex.
Notably, you cannot simply add 19.8% commission to the 6% transaction fee and conclude that total fees come to 25.8%.
The reason is that these two charges are calculated on two different bases.
Platform commission is calculated on the product price after deducting the discount funded by the seller, while the transaction fee is calculated on the amount the customer actually pays. The two different denominators mean an accurate profit calculation has to follow TikTok Shop’s detailed formula rather than simply adding the percentages together.
This is a point a great many sellers are missing.
Revenue rises but profit can fall
A fairly common phenomenon on e-commerce marketplaces is that sales keep growing while actual profit goes down.
The cause is not only the rise in fees.
An order today usually carries several costs at once:
- Platform commission.
- Transaction fee.
- Vouchers funded by the seller.
- Affiliate costs.
- TikTok Ads.
- Livestream costs.
- Return costs.
- Warehouse operations and customer care.
If each of these rises by only a few per cent, the final total cost can far exceed the product’s original margin.
In categories such as cosmetics, fashion or low-value goods in particular, only a few thousand dong of extra cost per order is enough to change the margin entirely.
Another change worth noting
From 2026, TikTok Shop has also changed its commission refund policy.
For orders that were delivered successfully but later returned by the customer, the platform commission will not be refunded. Only orders cancelled before delivery qualify for a refund.
This puts considerable extra cost pressure on categories with high return rates, such as fashion and cosmetics.
What should sellers do right now?
Rather than simply raising prices across the board, businesses should start managing profit at the level of the individual product.
The first thing is to recalculate the contribution margin for each SKU against the new fee schedule for the correct level-3 category.
Next, review every affiliate programme, voucher and advertising campaign to identify which products are consuming budget without producing a matching profit.
Businesses should also sort products into three groups: products that generate profit, products that attract customers and products that drive sales volume. Not every SKU needs to run advertising or affiliate at the same commission rate.
For brands with catalogues of hundreds or thousands of SKUs, building a profit report by product, by category and by campaign will matter far more than simply tracking GMV or order counts.
Finally, keep up with TikTok Shop’s fee changes regularly. In the current period the platform’s policies change fairly quickly, and each adjustment can have a direct effect on business performance.
Conclusion
This fee change reflects a general trend among e-commerce platforms: after a period of expanding market share, the focus is shifting towards optimising the platform’s own revenue.
That means a seller’s competitive advantage will no longer lie in selling more orders, but in the ability to control costs and manage profit on each product.
With costs rising, the most important question is no longer "How much did we sell?" but "After all the fees, how much do we actually keep?"
References
- TikTok Shop Academy Vietnam – Platform commission schedule for Mall sellers (effective 3 August 2026).
- TikTok Shop Academy – Overview of the fees that apply to sellers.
- Lao Dong newspaper (4 August 2026): analysis of TikTok Shop Mall’s new fee schedule.
- TikTok Shop Vietnam’s transaction fee policy and fee refund policy.
