TikTok Shop gives you a set of built-in promotional tools inside Seller Center (Marketing → Promotions / Flash Deals). In practice, Malaysian sellers lean on a handful:
- Product discounts: a percentage or fixed RM cut on a specific SKU, shown as a strikethrough price.
- Flash deals: a time-boxed, limited-stock discount with a countdown, built to create urgency on the feed and in LIVE.
- Seller vouchers: a claimable code or coupon, often with a minimum spend, to lift basket size.
- Bundle / “buy more, save more”: deals to move slow stock and raise average order value.
TikTok limits purchase-based incentives to a defined set of permitted tool types, and the exact list, eligibility and setup screens change and can differ by market: so always confirm the current options in your own Seller Center rather than copying a tool name from an overseas blog. The principle underneath them doesn’t change: each one is a price change, not a free marketing lever. Treat it like one.
Price backward from margin
Before you set a single voucher, build your all-in cost stack for the SKU. On TikTok Shop Malaysia in late 2026 that means:
- Category commission: revised from 00:00 on 31 October 2026. Most sub-categories went up, a few (feminine care, medical supplies, OTC medications, nursing & feeding) came down, and core food staples stay at 0%. Pull your own sub-category’s new rate in Seller Center; last month’s number is stale.
- Transaction fee: 3.78% (SST inclusive) on most payment methods; 4.86% (SST incl.) on TikTok PayLater orders since 16 October.
- Fulfilment: your real packing and shipping cost. Remember the buyer shipping-fee promotion reverted to the standard rate card on 12 October, so shipping is a cost you now carry or build into price.
- Ad reinvestment: if you’re in GMV Max, roughly 5% of GMV (3% for electronics) is auto-converted into ads. That spends against your discounted price too.
Add those up, subtract from your discounted selling price, and you have your contribution margin at the promo price. If it’s thin or negative, the promotion isn’t a promotion. Set a margin floor per SKU and don’t let a flash deal cross it.
Seller-funded vs platform-funded: the stacking that protects margin
Here’s the detail nobody explains, and it’s worth real money. TikTok Shop calculates commission as (item price − seller discount) × your category rate, SST-inclusive, with shipping fees and TikTok’s own platform discounts excluded from the base.
Read that again. Your own seller-funded discount is deducted before commission is charged, so a deeper voucher does lower your commission base a little. But a platform-funded voucher is excluded from the base, which means you get the sales lift without paying commission on the subsidised portion. The move, then, is to lean on co-funded campaign vouchers where you can and layer your own discount on top only as far as your margin floor allows, rather than funding the whole cut yourself.
This is also where the #JomLokal cost-of-living programme matters: TikTok extended 0% commission across a long list of essential sub-categories and added an RM2-per-order rebate on standard shipping nationwide. If you sell groceries, dairy, baby or other essentials, check whether your category is on the 0% list before you discount, you may have far more room than you think, and some of your “promotion” is already being subsidised.