How LASI calculates TikTok fees

The short version

• When you finalize a show, LASI estimates the fee at your shop’s rate, on the item sales plus the shipping your buyers paid.
• Within hours, TikTok publishes its own estimate for each order. LASI replaces its figure with TikTok’s, order by order.
• When each order settles, LASI replaces the estimate with what TikTok actually charged. Once every order has, the show reads Fees final and stops moving.
• All of it happens by itself, every hour. Nothing is typed, and the figure you were shown on the night is kept beside the corrected one so you can see the difference.

Why a fee cannot be exact on the night

The order feed TikTok gives a seller carries what the buyer paid: the item price, the shipping, the tax, any discount. It carries nothing about what TikTok will keep. The commission is assessed on the settled amount, after delivery and after the return window, and refunds, partial refunds and cancellations all change it on the way.

Any tool showing a fee the moment a show ends is therefore showing an estimate, whether it says so or not. LASI says so, and then keeps going until the number is TikTok’s own.

What TikTok charges the fee on

This is the part most spreadsheets get wrong. TikTok’s referral fee is charged on the item price plus the shipping the buyer paid, not on the item price alone. Measured over thousands of settled orders, the fee came to the same percentage of item + buyer-paid shipping on more than 99 in 100 of them, while as a percentage of the item price alone it wandered from month to month with how much shipping buyers happened to pay.

A “6% fee” multiplied by item sales alone would book $60.00 here, $16.80 too little. That gap is why a seller’s fees look higher in their payouts than in their own records. LASI applies your rate to the real base. When a show’s shipping is not known (no linked stream, a typed total), it uses your shop’s measured rate on item sales instead, which already carries the shipping share; it never quietly uses the low figure.

We checked this rule against a real shop’s settled orders, one at a time: the anonymous case study shows it matching TikTok to the cent on 97% of 1,137 orders, and why the rest differ.

The three stages every order goes through

A show’s fee is the sum of its orders, and each order is priced from the best source that exists for it right now. That matters: a show with half its orders settled is not “half paid”, it is the settled half at the real figure plus the other half at the next best one.

• A refund reverses part of a fee. LASI nets an order’s rows as TikTok signs them. It never takes the size of each row, which would book a refunded fee as a second charge.
• A cancelled order is never estimated. If TikTok settled something against it anyway, that is real money and it counts.
• A free item owes nothing and never keeps a show open: TikTok does not settle a $0 order at all.
• Nothing is guessed across a stage. An order moves up only when TikTok has given a fee that can be read.
• Once every order has settled the show is final. Any small gap between your recorded sales and TikTok’s is then a difference in how the sale was recorded, not an unpaid fee, and LASI stops estimating on it.

Where your rate comes from

Settings → Business → TikTok Fees. New shops start on Automatic:

The rate only ever prices the estimated stage. Once TikTok has spoken about an order, its number replaces yours, whatever rate you chose.

How the corrected fee reaches your books

Every hour LASI reads TikTok’s settlements and its pre-settlement estimates, works out each open show’s fee as above, and writes it onto that show’s sales, spread by price to the cent. Your profit reports, the P&L and the show’s own report all read those sales, so they correct themselves together.

• The fee from the night you finalized is kept. The Finance page shows both (“Latest fees” and “At finalize”) and the difference.
• Re-finalizing a show rebuilds its sales; the next hourly pass simply corrects it again.
• You can switch the correction off in the same settings card. Every show then goes back to the figure from the night, exactly.
• A show needs its stream linked for any of this: the link is how LASI knows which TikTok orders were that show. It is one tap on the phone while the stream runs, or picked when you price the show.

Sales LASI cannot match to an order

A show with no linked stream, sales brought in through the standalone import, or a show whose record was deleted: none of these can be tied to TikTok’s orders, so no order-by-order figure will ever exist for them. Leaving them on the night’s estimate for good would be the easy answer and often the wrong one.

Instead, once a month has closed and its orders have settled (21 days after it ends), LASI prices those sales at the rate TikTok actually charged on item sales in that same month. It is a measured rate, not a per-order figure, and the Finance page labels it that way (“at the month’s rate”). A month without enough settled orders to measure has no rate, and its sales keep what they had: nothing is borrowed from the month next door.

We tested the tempting alternatives before building this and threw them out. Matching by day looked right and agreed with TikTok on barely a quarter of days, because a show is often recorded on a different day than it streamed. Link the stream and the show moves to its exact fees within the hour.

Shipping labels, either way you buy them

There are two ways to ship, they hit your payout differently, and many shops do some of each. LASI reads which happened from the settlement itself, per order, with nothing to set up.

One rule keeps this honest: TikTok’s label charge is only counted on a show whose buyer-paid shipping is also recorded. A cost with no income beside it would make shipping look like a loss it was not.

Early payouts and their fee

If you use TikTok’s Early Settlement, TikTok advances part of a shipped order’s value before it settles and takes the advance back out of later payouts. The advance itself is timing: it changes when money arrives, not how much. Its service fee is a real cost, and TikTok deducts it from the advance without listing it on any statement.

LASI works it out. An advance is a whole-dollar amount less the fee, so an advance of $4,650.00 at 0.5% arrives as $4,626.75: the $23.25 is the fee. LASI finds the one rate, among those TikTok’s terms allow, that turns your advances back into whole dollars. If no rate explains them, the fee is shown as unknown, never assumed. The fee goes on your P&L’s platform-fee line on the day of the advance, and Finance → Cash flow shows what was advanced, what was taken back, the fee, and how much TikTok has advanced and not yet recovered.

Money that belongs to no order

TikTok also settles money tied to no order at all: a reimbursement for a parcel the carrier lost, a chargeback, a deduction. It is in your payouts, so it is on your P&L, on its own line (“TikTok reimbursements & chargebacks”), dated by the statement that carried it because there is no sale to date it by. It is not revenue, since nothing was sold, and not a fee, since nothing was charged for a sale, so it moves profit without moving either of those.

Host commission

A host’s commission is worked out on the show’s sales less its fees. It is filed when you finalize, on LASI’s estimate, and then updated exactly once: when TikTok’s own figure has arrived for the show’s orders, usually within hours, the commission is re-cut on that fee, at the rate already on the entry. If some orders still have no figure from TikTok a day after the show closed, it goes ahead with what TikTok has. After that it stays put. A settlement two weeks later changes your books, not anyone’s pay; a host’s entry changes again only when a person finalizes again, links, corrects or re-files it, and an amount someone typed by hand is never overwritten.

What LASI does not know

• The newest week is always partly an estimate. That is TikTok’s timing, not a gap in the data. The Finance page says how much of any range is final.
• An unlinked show never gets order-by-order fees. It gets its month’s measured rate, which is close and is labelled as what it is.
• A label bill you have not entered is unknown, and is shown as owed, not as zero.
• A fee TikTok has not settled yet can still move: a return next week changes this week’s figure, and it will.
• Other channels are simpler. Shopify sales use Shopify’s published rates for your plan, and other marketplaces a flat rate; none of the above applies to them.

Where to see all of this

• Finance → Shows: each show’s fee at finalize beside its fee now, how many of its orders are settled, estimated by TikTok or still on your rate, and how much of its payout is in the bank.
• Finance → Cash flow: every order from sale to deposit, the deposits themselves, and early payouts.
• Finance → P&L: the “Latest fees / At finalize” switch, and the note beneath it saying how many shows are final, settling, at the month’s rate or on the estimate.
• Settings → Business → TikTok Fees: your rate, how it was measured, and the correction switch.