You sold $10,000 on TikTok Shop this month. TikTok deposited $6,200. Nothing was refunded that you can remember, so where did the other $3,800 go? This is the single most common question TikTok Shop sellers ask, and the answer is almost never "TikTok stole your money" — it's that a settlement bundles a dozen different deductions into one number, and the platform's own dashboard rarely shows them side by side.
Here is every category that sits between your gross sales and the money that lands in your bank, roughly in the order it eats into a payout.
1. Platform commission
TikTok Shop takes a referral/commission percentage on each order. The rate varies by category and by program (and TikTok has changed it more than once), so the exact percentage matters less than this: it is charged on the item price, and across hundreds of orders it is usually the largest single deduction. If your "missing" money is roughly a fixed percentage of sales, this is most of it.
2. Transaction / payment processing fees
A separate, smaller percentage covers payment processing. It's easy to overlook because it's small per order, but it compounds across volume.
3. Affiliate commissions
If a creator drove the sale through TikTok's affiliate program, their commission comes out of your settlement, not TikTok's. Sellers who run big affiliate campaigns are often shocked at how much this removes — and because the commission rate is one you set, this line is worth auditing: a rate that drifted from 8% to 12% quietly changes your margin on every affiliate order.
4. Refunds and partial refunds
Refunds are netted out of the settlement that covers the period they were processed in — which is often not the same period the original sale settled. This timing mismatch is a top reason a month looks "short": you're paying back a refund for a sale whose revenue landed in a previous payout.
5. Creator samples booked as 100%-discount orders
This one confuses almost everyone. Free samples you send to creators frequently show up in exports as orders with a 100% discount — real "orders" with zero revenue. If you naively count order rows, your order count and average order value both look wrong. Any honest reconciliation has to recognize and set these aside.
6. Settlement holds and reserves
Money from recent orders is often held for a period before it's released — a buffer against returns and chargebacks. So a payout can be smaller than your sales simply because a chunk of it is not yet due to you, and a later payout will be larger than its own sales because last period's hold is being released. Reserves are the number one reason a single month, viewed in isolation, never reconciles.
7. Storage, fulfillment and penalty fees
Depending on how you fulfill, there may be warehousing fees, shipping charges paid by the seller, and penalty/violation fees (late dispatch, cancellations). These are small individually and buried in the settlement file, which is exactly why they're worth surfacing — a creeping penalty fee is money you can often prevent.
How to actually find your gap
The reliable method is not to eyeball the dashboard. It's to take the settlement export and rebuild the payout from the bottom up:
- Sum gross revenue from real orders (excluding 100%-discount sample rows).
- Subtract commission, transaction fees and affiliate commissions.
- Subtract refunds that landed in this period.
- Account for what was held back into reserve, and what reserve was released.
- Subtract storage, shipping-paid-by-you and any penalties.
If your rebuilt number matches the deposit, you've explained every penny. If it doesn't, the residual is exactly where to look — and more often than you'd expect, the residual is a fee that shouldn't be there.
Doing this by hand across a few thousand settlement rows is miserable and error-prone. That's what Sumhound is for: upload the export and it rebuilds the waterfall for you, to the cent, and points at anything it can't explain.