What does it cost to wait another year on TikTok Shop? According to Remy Beaumont, founder of Z MEDIA Group, the answer is compounding: higher commissions, more competition, and a market share deficit that grows every day a brand’s competitors are on the platform, and they are not.

Remy would know. Z MEDIA Group, the London-based social commerce agency he leads, was among the first official TikTok Shop Partner agencies in the UK, entering in 2022 when the platform’s interface was still in Mandarin and live shopping was the only available format. The agency has since reported more than $100 million in gross merchandise value for brands including L’Oréal, MyProtein, and Wingstop.

Remy did not set out to build a TikTok Shop agency, though. He started with two e-commerce businesses that used TikTokers to promote products at a time when the rest of the market had not registered that possibility. That observation became Gen Z Talent, then Gen Z Media, then Z MEDIA after a restructuring in 2024. 

“When we first started doing TikTok Shop, it was all about live,” Remy says. “There was no video, there were no paid ads, it was exclusively live.” That vantage point shapes how Z MEDIA thinks about the platform today and why, in Remy’s view, most brands arriving now are still making the same category error.

A Four-Phase Playbook Built for a Moving Target

Z MEDIA’s approach to a TikTok Shop launch is structured around four distinct phases, each defined by a different success signal.

The first is discovery: looking for product-market fit signals from the affiliate network. If creators are reluctant to post, that tells Remy something about the brand’s readiness before a dollar of ad spend is committed. “If you’re having to literally beg creators to work with your brand, there’s some work to do,” he says.

When positive signals emerge – hooks, angles, and messaging – the agency scales aggressively, sending thousands of product samples to creators each month to manufacture both demand and what Remy calls “virality in the process.” Phase three shifts the optimization target from growth to contribution margin. Phase four is strategic reinvestment: new product launches, paid media sprints timed to when creative shows signs of fatigue.

The phased model matters because TikTok Shop, in Remy’s framing, is not a switch. “You can’t just turn it on and have a huge ROI,” he says. But for brands willing to absorb early-stage economics, the downstream math holds. “For every two orders we make on TikTok Shop, we can track at least one additional order on Amazon and one additional order direct-to-consumer,” Remy says. “We’re basically doing double the number of orders of what TikTok says we are doing, but it’s happening off platform.”

The case study he points to is Meroda Cosmetics, a Netherlands-based beauty brand that Z MEDIA launched in the UK market. The brand went from zero to £500,000 in GMV in 90 days, generating 12,000 pieces of content in the process, and hit £1 million in eight months. It was the fastest-growing new beauty brand on TikTok Shop UK during the Q4 trading period. The product, a changing foundation, helped: a visual demonstration closed the gap between awareness and purchase in under three seconds.

The Misconceptions Brands Carry In

Remy highlights two assumptions that follow almost every new client through the door. Both are wrong, according to him.

The first is demographic. Brands consistently question whether their audience is on TikTok, assuming it skews too young. Remy points to data showing 67% of TikTok users are over 25, and notes that the fastest-growing customer segment on TikTok is the over-45 cohort. “The story is that the kids downloaded TikTok first, then their parents downloaded it to see what their kids were up to, and then the grandparents,” he says.

The second misconception concerns average order value. TikTok Shop launched as a platform of low-cost impulse items. That era is over. The fastest-growing fashion category on the platform right now is pre-loved luxury, with transaction values running into thousands of pounds. “When TikTok Shop first started, it was very much 99p products,” Remy says. “But that’s not the case at all anymore.”

Both assumptions share a common root: brands are pattern-matching against a version of TikTok Shop that no longer exists.

Volume, Quality, and the Dark Horse Creator

Z MEDIA’s creator strategy does not begin with a shortlist of names. It begins with numbers.

Remy notes that TikTok ranks affiliate creators from L1 to L7 based on the GMV they drive. The rankings shift constantly, which means a creator who generated $1,000 last month might generate $200,000 next month. “You’re constantly looking for what we refer to as dark horse creators,” he says. When one surfaces, Z MEDIA retains, coaches, and upskills them. The creator gains income consistency; the agency gains loyalty and repeat content from a known performer.

ROI measurement follows the same whole-system logic. Per-creator performance is the wrong unit of analysis. “You can’t really look at it from a per-creator perspective,” Remy says. “Each creator really serves a purpose. Even if they’re not driving GMV, they’re signaling to the algorithm that lots of different people are talking about this.” A top-funnel creator with a wide reach but modest sales still provides value to the affiliate ecosystem by informing smaller affiliates about what to post.

The role of affiliates has also shifted at the platform level. Over the past two years, they have moved from being the primary GMV driver to being the content acquisition engine that feeds paid media, which is now where the majority of sales are generated. Organic affiliate content is the raw material; paid amplification converts it.

Discovery Commerce vs. Intent Commerce

The clearest competitive frame Remy applies to TikTok Shop is its contrast with Amazon.

Amazon captures purchase intent that already exists. Customers arrive with a specific problem, search for a solution, and buy. TikTok Shop operates on different mechanics: the majority of purchases happen because the platform interrupts someone’s entertainment. 

“Customers don’t go on TikTok intending to buy something,” Remy says. “It’s very much leaning into impulse mechanics, the fear of missing out, and the platform culture of ‘everybody is talking about this.'”

That distinction makes the two channels complementary rather than competing. TikTok creates demand; Amazon and direct-to-consumer capture it. The halo effect flows in one direction, which is why Remy’s argument for TikTok Shop investment includes off-platform returns that the platform’s own attribution does not capture.

Meta and YouTube are building social commerce products, but Remy does not see them closing the gap quickly. TikTok’s early market investments, subsidized product pricing, five-figure creator incentives for single live streams, and dedicated agency support infrastructure were at a scale its competitors have not matched. “Apart from having a couple of landing pages with a support ticket system at best,” he says of YouTube and Meta’s current infrastructure. 

The algorithm also differs structurally: TikTok primarily serves users content from accounts they do not follow, while Instagram serves them content from accounts they do, a difference in discovery mechanics that shapes what social commerce can accomplish on each platform.

Why Social Commerce Rewards Relatability, Not Aspiration

The single thing most brands still get wrong, in Remy’s view, is applying the wrong creative model.

“They still very much think it’s Influencer Marketing like Instagram in 2015, where you have one massive creator who is super aspirational,” he says. That model caps because consumers have become increasingly suspicious of branded content from large accounts. Reach arrives; conversion does not follow.

TikTok Shop runs on different mechanics. “Social commerce is not about aspiration, it’s about relatability,” Remy says. 

The principle his team has adopted is blunt: guys in Hawaiian shirts buy from guys in Hawaiian shirts. A macro influencer drives awareness. A distributed network of micro and nano creators, each representing a specific combination of traits, demographics, and interests, closes the sale. “You’ve got somebody there that relates to somebody in every way, shape, and form,” he says.

This is why Z MEDIA’s affiliate activation model prioritizes breadth alongside depth. No single creator represents the brand. The collective does.

Building the Ecosystem Around TikTok Shop

Z MEDIA is not stopping at campaign management. Remy has treated the structural pain points his clients face as a product roadmap.

UK and European brands wanting to expand into the U.S. market, and vice versa, were blocked by compliance, tax, and entity requirements. Z MEDIA’s response was CRSSBRDR, a co-founded merchant-of-record business that allows brands to expand across the UK, U.S., and EU without establishing separate legal entities.

On the platform’s trajectory, Remy expects enterprise brands to arrive in volume, new categories to open, including food delivery and digital products, and TikTok to continue its pursuit of becoming an everything app. His benchmark for that ambition: “TikTok achieved in three years what took eBay thirty.”

For brands still on the sidelines, his framing is economic rather than motivational. Commissions will rise, competition will intensify, and every day a competitor gains market share raises the cost of recapturing it. 

“It will never be cheaper than it is now to start,” Remy says. “Those that launch early will get the most support from TikTok, the most touch time, the most incentives. As the platform matures in that market, it will become harder and harder to cut through the noise.”

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