TikTok Shop generated $33 billion in sales worldwide last year, of which $9 billion originated from the United States (per Statista), yet entire product categories remain untouched by established brands. 

According to Rafay M.H., founder of UpTik, a specialized mentorship platform for e-commerce brands looking to leverage TikTok, this gap has created many opportunities.

“There are categories that are absolutely untouched on this platform,” Rafay explains. “People fall for the empty room fallacy, where they’ll go into a room and think, ‘Oh, there’s nobody here, that means there’s no market’ or ‘There’s a lot of people here, so it’s saturated.’ What they don’t realize is they’re entering a room where nobody else has tried yet.”

While makeup, skincare, supplements, and kitchen products are already performing well on TikTok Shop, Rafay points to pet products, home decor, crafts, DIY items, and board games as categories with enormous untapped potential.

This industry insight stems from Rafay’s progress as an entrepreneur. After nearly a decade in e-commerce building Amazon-focused brands, he recognized a key vulnerability: “I realized that a lot of my business is basically Amazon’s business because they control the traffic and customers.” During the pandemic, he began experimenting with TikTok, quickly recognizing its potential not just as another social platform, but as a powerful traffic engine that could drive customers to multiple sales channels and create what he calls a “halo effect.”

“If you drive traffic to TikTok Shop, there is a substantial halo effect to other platforms like Amazon, and it even impacts your CPA on Meta ads,” he explains. “You could even run the TikTok Shop as a break-even platform, and still eat up significant profit on all the other marketplaces from the increased top of funnel attention that spills over from TikTok. It makes your competition, who is competing with you, just on one platform, irrelevant.”

This realization led him to develop UpTik’s methodology—a selective eight-week mentorship program that helps brands build in-house capabilities across three critical TikTok traffic levers: borrowed traffic (affiliates), paid traffic (ads), and owned traffic (internal creators and brand content).

The System for Identifying Opportunity

Not every product is suited for TikTok success, but Rafay has developed a three-filter system to identify products with high potential. First, the product must be visually demonstrable. Second, it should offer a clear before-and-after transformation effect. Third, there must be a passionate audience around the problem space that the product addresses.

“As long as you’ve assessed those three filters of products, that is a golden opportunity to launch your product on TikTok,” he says.

This methodical approach reflects Rafay’s analysis process. When new brands approach UpTik, his first step is evaluating their product suite against these filters, followed by examining profit margins and audience depth before developing a custom strategy.

“I create benchmarks across either direct competitors or adjacent categories that serve the same avatar,” he explains. “What was your pricing like? What was your promotion mix like? So that as closely as we can, we’re going to model that as a benchmark.”

Reimagining Creator Relationships

Central to Rafay’s approach is a practical shift in how brands interact with creators. Rather than viewing creators as mere promotional channels, he encourages brands to understand the motivations and challenges of creators.

“What makes a great creator? I think that’s the wrong question,” Rafay observes. “What makes a good brand for a creator to work with? That’s how you want to look at it because most brands think that they’re the prize. You may have made millions on other platforms, but you’re starting at zero on TikTok.”

He acknowledges that creators constantly evaluate opportunities based on their potential return on time investment. “The calculus that the creator is going through in their head is this: Is an opportunity worth my time versus this with zero sales and zero progress versus this other brand that’s already getting sales?”

To attract high-performing creators, Rafay recommends creating a “creative sandbox” with angles and examples of high-performing content. “Come up with angles for them. What is the best-performing content in this niche? How can you help them with their goal?” he explains.

Rafay also emphasizes the importance of addressing creators’ main challenges. “If you get them in a community of creators for your brand, how can I gamify this system? If you reach this amount of views, you unlock this gift package. If you reach this amount of GMV, you get this bonus.”

Understanding creators’ desire for stable income and recognition changes the relationship from transactional to collaborative. “They want to get off the content hamster wheel and get paid consistently,” Rafay notes. “If it’s dependent on their performance, then they’re going to want to stay with you, and you’re going to want them to stay with you as well.”

From Cold Start to Flywheel Effect

UpTik’s approach to TikTok Shop is organized around three phases: cold start, boosting, and rapid growth. Rafay emphasizes that one of the biggest mistakes brands make is trying to skip straight to the third phase without building the necessary foundation.

“Everyone wants to skip to rapid growth. They see other people, they’re like, ‘I can do that.’ But they don’t realize the volume that went through in each of those sections,” he explains.

One success story illustrates this approach. A brand spent five to six weeks building foundational elements and generated nearly $400,000 in GMV on TikTok Shop in the following 30 days. Their TikTok ads achieved a 17x ROAS—generating $17 for every dollar spent.

“Once you start entering the growth phase, these results create a self-reinforcing cycle,” Rafay explains. “Instead of your efforts initially being outbound, where you’re trying your hardest to get creators to work with you, the dynamic shifts so that your brand/product becomes the prize.” 

He elaborates further, “Creators are coming to you inbound, and you now begin to get sample requests from all these high-GMV creators who want to work with you. Some even just go ahead and buy the product and create content anyway because they know it will work without you even saying anything.”

Rather than focusing on metrics like views, Rafay highlights metrics that truly indicate business health: creator conversion ratio (what percentage of creators’ content generates actual sales), post rate (the ratio of content created to samples sent), and shop sell-through rate (the percentage of products in your store that are actually selling).

“TikTok cares about your shop’s sell-through rate,” Rafay explains. “If I’ve got 10 listings and only three of them have made a sale in the last 30 to 90 days, I have a 30% shop sell-through rate. But if I’m not promoting those other products, please remove them from your store. If you have four and only three are selling, that’s a 75% shop sell-through rate. So TikTok is going to give you more e-commerce buyer traffic.”

Building for the Coming Wave of Social Commerce

While TikTok Shop is present in all current conversations about social commerce, Rafay sees it as just the beginning of a larger shift.

“Everyone is talking about it, but it’s just the first boat off the line, and the wave we’re really riding is social commerce,” he notes.

This perspective informs UpTik’s roadmap. While remaining selective about the brands it accepts into its program, Rafay plans to develop systems that can be applied across all social commerce platforms. 

“The space is moving so fast. As I look ahead this year and beyond, the goal will be to develop even plug-and-play systems that don’t just apply to TikTok Shop but allow brands to catch the social commerce wave across all channels,” 

Rafay’s view includes embracing AI in content creation to address the volume requirements of social commerce. “AI is a space you need to look out for,” he advises. “If you reset the waterline of the volume that’s required and you can create systems for that, your business will be able to get multiples you can’t get anywhere else, and you’ll leave every other brand owner that’s doing the stuff that worked in 2019-2022 in the dust.”

The Window Remains Open—For Now

For creator economy professionals assessing where to focus their efforts, Rafay’s message is clear: despite the hype and headlines, the opportunity on TikTok Shop remains available, but it won’t stay that way forever.

“In 2025, believe it or not, it’s still underpriced attention,” he insists. “People are still focusing on their Google Ads, Amazon PPC, or Meta ad spend because they don’t want to do the work to figure out the creator content pipeline. Meanwhile, brands are starting and reaching $1 million per month in as little as five months. And that is the gap you can take advantage of.”

He believes that brands recognizing this opportunity and developing the internal capabilities to capitalize on it now will be able to ride the wave of social commerce for years to come. 

Rafay’s core philosophy centers on building “anti-fragile” businesses—those that don’t rely on a single platform or traffic source but instead develop multiple ‘Attention centers’ that work in concert to make your competition irrelevant and ultimately create a robust anti-fragile business.”

As Rafay puts it with characteristic directness: “There has never been a better time to be an e-commerce seller if you are switched on.”