With the volume of people joining TikTok Shop growing so fast — the number of active creators jumped 46 times in a year in Brazil, according to Eletrolar News — the number of people making the same basic mistakes also grows, from a lack of information, not a lack of effort.
The first common mistake is choosing a product by personal preference instead of proven demand. Liking a product is not the same as there being a market for it. The second mistake is entering an already saturated category, drawn by other shops' sales volume, without realizing that competition has already cut the margin for whoever enters now. The third mistake is ignoring the creator in the equation: setting up a shop, listing a nice product and expecting it to sell on its own, with no content partnership strategy at all — which practically rules out the "discovery shopping" model that sustains TikTok Shop.
A fourth, more subtle mistake is confusing an isolated growth percentage with a real trend. A product that jumps from 5 to 50 sales looks like it "grew 900%", but that can just be statistical noise from a small base — not necessarily a sign that the product will keep growing. Making a large investment decision based only on that kind of number, without looking at absolute volume and consistency over time, is an expensive mistake.
The fifth mistake is not measuring anything after starting — selling in the dark, without tracking whether the chosen category is cooling down, whether competition is increasing, or whether a related product with more traction has appeared that would be worth testing too.
All these mistakes have a common root: a decision made without enough data. The good news is that this problem has a simple solution — tracking real indicators of growth, volume and competition before and after each decision, instead of deciding once and never looking back.
Avoid these mistakes from the start with real, up-to-date data from Vellum Lens.
