Should you switch TikTok Shop agency, or is the problem somewhere else?

The four checks, before you decide

Switching agency costs a handover, a ramp-up, and usually a month of momentum. It is worth being sure. All four checks use data you already have access to, and none of them requires the agency's cooperation.

• Shop Performance Score in Seller Center. If account health is constraining reach, no agency can grow through it, and the incoming one will hit the same ceiling. This is the first thing to look at because it is the cause most often missed.
• Creator content arriving, weekly. Open Affiliate Center and count new creator videos over the last four weeks against the four before that. A falling count is the single best predictor of falling revenue, and it shows up before the revenue does.
• Contribution margin per SKU, after commission and ad spend. If the channel does not clear margin at your current rates, the agency is not the constraint — the economics are, and a new agency inherits the same arithmetic.
• Whether the reporting traces to Seller Center. Ask for one figure from the last report and ask where in Seller Center you can see it yourself. An agency that cannot answer that quickly is reporting from a slide rather than from the account.

If the first three are healthy and the shop is still not moving, execution is the problem and switching is reasonable. If margin is the issue, changing agency changes nothing.

What a new agency inherits, and what it does not

Everything material stays with you, because a TikTok Shop is registered to your business rather than to an agency. The account, the revenue, the listings, the order and review history, the performance data in Seller Center, and the creator relationships in your Affiliate Center are all yours and all transfer by default.

An agency operates your shop through access granted in TikTok's Partner Center, which you grant and you revoke, from Seller Center under Agencies & Partners. Nobody can hold the account.

Two things do not transfer automatically, and they are worth asking for explicitly:

• Creator content usage rights. These depend on the authorization each individual creator granted, not on the agency relationship. Permission to run a video as a Spark Ad does not extend to other platforms.
• The working context. Which creators performed and why, what was tested, what failed, what the brief said. None of it is visible in Seller Center, all of it saves the next team a month, and it is the item most often skipped at handover. Ask for it in writing before you give notice.

Our full position on ownership and offboarding is here, and it applies to leaving us as much as to joining.

Questions worth asking any agency, including us

These are the questions that separate an operator from a reseller. We would rather you asked them of everyone.

• "Show me where this number lives in Seller Center." Any reported figure should be traceable to the account in under a minute.
• "How many creators posted last month, and how many took samples without posting?" An agency running the affiliate programme knows both numbers. Most creators who take a sample never post — an agency that reports only the successes is not showing you the operation.
• "What commission rate did you set and what landed margin did you set it against?" If the answer is a category benchmark rather than your margin, the rate was copied, not calculated.
• "What would make you tell us to stop spending?" An agency with no answer has no threshold, and an agency with no threshold will keep spending.
• "Who owns the account, the data and the creator relationships if we leave, and will you put it in the contract?" The answer should be immediate and it should be yes.
• "Are you a TikTok Shop Official Partner, and can I verify that from my own Seller Center?" Partner status is checkable under Agencies & Partners. It does not confer algorithmic advantage, and any agency implying it does is telling you something untrue.

When we would tell you not to switch

Three situations where we have told brands to stay where they are:

• The margin does not work. If affiliate commission plus ad spend plus platform fees plus an agency fee leaves nothing, the next agency inherits the same arithmetic. The fix is pricing, product mix or COGS, and it is not an agency decision.
• You are three months in. Creator seeding, content production and the first ad tests take roughly ninety days to produce a signal worth reading. Switching at week eight restarts the clock and buys another ninety days of the same wait.
• The constraint is inventory or fulfillment. An agency cannot generate demand you are unable to ship. Cancelled orders damage account health, which then constrains reach, which looks like the agency underperforming.

Saying this costs us engagements. It also means that when we do say the agency is the problem, it is worth something.

How a handover to MADA works

Nothing dramatic. You grant us partner access in Seller Center, we audit before we change anything, and you keep every credential.

• Week one is diagnosis, not action. Shop Performance Score and violation history, listing conversion trend, creator activity trend, contribution margin per SKU. You get the findings whether or not they flatter the previous agency.
• We do not rebuild what works. If the affiliate structure is sound, it stays. The most common mistake an incoming agency makes is resetting a working programme to look busy.
• Creators come first. Re-engaging creators who have already sold your product is faster and cheaper than recruiting strangers, and it is the quickest route back to weekly content.
• Access is yours to revoke, always. Under Agencies & Partners in your own Seller Center.

Fees are published rather than quoted: $2,500 a month below $25,000 in monthly GMV, 10% of GMV at or above it, one or the other, no setup fee. The detail is here.

Frequently asked questions