TikTok Integration – Feature & Process Guide

TikTok Shop is a listing-oriented social-commerce marketplace: the same product sold by different sellers shows up as a separate listing rather than one shared catalogue entry, and buyers discover and buy directly from short-form videos, livestreams and the in-app shop tab. Pentagon Connect connects to TikTok Shop through a seller-authorised connection — once a seller approves access, Hemi keeps product, price, stock, order and after-sales data flowing automatically, refreshing the connection on a regular schedule so it doesn't lapse.

This page describes what the TikTok integration supports — which product, pricing, order and refund/claims actions are available, what data we capture, and what isn't currently supported.

Quick Reference

Product Management

Pricing & Stock

Orders & Fulfilment

Refunds, Returns, Cancellations & Claims

Product Management

Creating products

A product is only picked up for creation once every one of its images has finished uploading to TikTok — images are tagged by role (main image, attribute image, description image, certification image, size-chart image) and any single failed upload blocks the whole product.

Before a product is sent, it's checked against TikTok's own taxonomy: the category, that category's required attributes, and any category-specific rules such as whether a size chart or product certification is required. A product missing something its category requires is blocked rather than sent through incomplete. Brand is matched against TikTok's brand list by name — an exact match first, then a case-insensitive fallback.

TikTok doesn't confirm approval on the create call itself; the product's review outcome (approved, still under review, or rejected) is checked separately afterwards. Product identifiers — GTIN, EAN, UPC or ISBN — can be set once on a SKU but can't be changed or removed on a later update, so it's worth getting them right the first time.

Updating products

A full product update (content, images, attributes, price and stock together) uses the same shape as creation, with a few rules specific to updating an existing listing:

• Adding a new variant: simply include it without an existing variant ID.
• Updating an existing variant: include its variant ID.
• Any published or awaiting-creation variant left out of the update is deleted from TikTok — so every live/pending variant has to be resent together on every update, not just the ones that changed.
• A closed variant is the exception: if a product has a closed variant that isn't included in an update, the whole update is blocked rather than silently removing that variant, and an error is raised instead.
• Products flagged "Protect the whole item", "Protect Price" or "Protect Quantity" are skipped from updates accordingly.

Price and stock can each be updated independently of a full content update, and of each other — see Pricing & Stock Sync below.

Deactivating / removing products

TikTok has explicit Activate and Deactivate actions, separate from create and update. Deactivating a product also deactivates all of its variants; draft, frozen or already-deleted products can't be activated or deactivated. Reactivating requires positive stock to already be in place — pushing stock to a deactivated product does not bring it back automatically, Activate has to be called first and stock pushed afterwards. Both actions can be applied to at most 20 products in a single request.

After activation, TikTok routes the product through its own review team before it actually goes live, so there's a short pending window rather than an instant switch. There's no separate delete action — deactivating is how a listing is taken down.

Pricing & Stock Sync

Price and stock are each updated through their own dedicated, lightweight flow, independent of a full product update and of each other — useful when only one of them needs refreshing.

• Price: a single sale price per SKU. There's no separate RRP / "compare at" / strike-through price field — TikTok's price update only supports one price per SKU. A price update can be rejected if the SKU is currently locked by an active TikTok promotion.
• Stock: a non-negative quantity per SKU, tied to a single warehouse. TikTok supports only one warehouse per seller per SKU, so splitting stock for the same SKU across multiple warehouses isn't supported.
• Protect Price / Protect Quantity: per-product flags that leave that product's price and/or stock out of every update sent to TikTok, so the live values on TikTok aren't overwritten.

Order Management

Getting orders

Orders are pulled from TikTok automatically and continuously, with the first run looking back 90 days; after that, each run picks up anything new or changed since the last check. Zero-value orders are downloaded and exported like any other order — TikTok frequently runs 100%-discount influencer promotions that still need to be fulfilled.

A newly paid order sits in a short buyer grace period (about an hour, during which the buyer can still cancel for free) before it's treated as ready to ship. As an order progresses on TikTok — paid, partially shipped, shipped, delivered, cancelled — its status in Pentagon Connect is kept in sync automatically, with no manual import step required.

Order information we store

For every order, Pentagon Connect stores:

• Marketplace order ID, order status, currency, and key dates (created, paid)
• Buyer email (marketplace-anonymised) and buyer ID
• Recipient name, phone number and delivery address — address detail varies by market: the UK stores several administrative levels plus a dedicated town field, the US uses a narrower set of levels, and elsewhere the city is derived from the full address text when no explicit city/district level is given
• Per line item: SKU, product name, quantity, price, and sales tax amount/rate
• Order-level shipping fee, shipping tax, product tax and total tax
• Carrier and tracking details once an order has shipped

Shipping orders

Before shipping anything, Hemi downloads the delivery options TikTok has enabled for the seller's warehouse, and, per delivery option, the couriers TikTok will accept — an order can only be shipped with a courier that's on TikTok's own list for that account. Courier selection follows a priority order: an explicit courier mapping configured for that account, then a direct name match against TikTok's own courier list, then the account's configured default courier. If none of those resolve, the shipment is blocked and an error is stored rather than guessing at a courier — unlike some other marketplaces, there's no generic fallback.

Partial shipment is supported: a single order line with more than one unit can be shipped in parts as stock allows, rather than requiring the whole order to go out in one shipment.

Cancellations

A seller can cancel an order before it ships — the whole order, or (in the US and UK) a single line item when that item is out of stock. Partially shipped orders can also have their not-yet-shipped lines cancelled. See Return & Refund Reason Codes below for the reasons available.

Refunds & returns

A seller can register a refund or return on the buyer's behalf after an order has shipped — in full or by specific line item — using one of a defined set of refund reasons (see Return & Refund Reason Codes below). This seller-initiated flow is separate from a buyer opening their own claim directly with TikTok, covered next.

Claims / incidents

TikTok has its own after-sales system that lets a buyer open a cancellation, return or refund request directly with TikTok, rather than going through the seller first — this is the "Claims Handle" flow, and it runs alongside (not instead of) the seller-initiated cancellations and refunds above. Pentagon Connect checks TikTok regularly for new buyer-raised requests and records each one against the order as a claim.

Each account can be configured with a default response — Accept or Reject — set separately for cancellation claims, refund-only claims, and return-and-refund claims, so routine claims can resolve automatically without a person touching every one. Where a cancellation is rejected because the item has already been packed for shipping, that reason is passed back to TikTok automatically as part of the rejection.

Approving a return is a two-step process: the return request is approved first, and then, once the physical item is actually back with the seller, a second step confirms receipt and triggers the refund itself. Cancelling or rejecting a claim is irreversible — there's no way to restart the order process afterwards, so it's worth reviewing claims carefully before an account is set to auto-reject.

Carriers Supported

Carriers aren't a fixed list we maintain — they're whichever couriers TikTok has enabled for the seller's warehouse and delivery options at the time, which Pentagon Connect reads live from TikTok. A carrier used on an order is matched against that list via a configured mapping, then a direct name match, then an account-level default. Unlike some other marketplaces, there's no generic fallback if none of those match: the shipment is blocked and flagged rather than sent through under a placeholder carrier.

Return & Refund Reason Codes

Refund reasons (available to the seller when refunding a shipped order):

• Package lost
• Product wouldn't arrive on time
• Missing product or accessories
• Package wasn't received
• Product doesn't match description
• Package or product is damaged
• Wrong product was sent
• Missed estimated delivery date
• Product is defective or doesn't work
• Suspected counterfeit

Cancellation reasons (available to the seller before an order ships):

• Out of stock
• Pricing error
• Buyer did not pay on time
• Unable to deliver to buyer address

The exact wording can differ slightly by market (UK reasons are near-identical variants of the US ones), but the lists above hold consistently as the reasons on offer.

Known Limitations

• No separate RRP/compare-at price — only a single sale price per SKU.
• One warehouse per SKU — no split-stock support for TikTok.
• At most 20 products per activate/deactivate request.
• Product identifiers (GTIN/EAN/UPC/ISBN), once set, can't be changed or removed later.
• A closed variant left out of an update blocks the whole update, by design, rather than being silently removed.
• Shipping requires a resolvable courier (mapping, name match, or account default) — there's no marketplace-side fallback if none match.
• Claim decisions (cancel/reject) can't be undone.
• Click & collect / pick-up point delivery: not documented in the current source material.

Source Materials

This guide was built from Pentagon Connect's TikTok Shop integration specifications covering authentication, taxonomy, product creation and updates, activation, pricing and stock, order retrieval and shipment, and cancellations, returns and claims.