Many shop owners run their own ads, find them expensive, then turn to KOCs or affiliates as a cheaper alternative. But if you do not price the commission into your landed cost before you launch a campaign, you can end up with more orders and thinner margins than when you were running nothing.
Commission is not the same as ad spend
When you run platform ads (TikTok Ads, Shopee Ads), you pay upfront and hope for orders. When you use KOCs or affiliates, you pay only when a real order comes in. This is the core difference, and it is why the model is attractive for shops with limited capital.
But commission is not a zero-upfront cost. It is a variable cost locked to every single order. On TikTok Shop and Shopee, affiliate commissions typically run from 8 to 25 percent of the sale price, depending on the category and how much you set to attract creators. That number has to come off the sale price before you count anything else as profit. If your gross margin after landed cost and platform fees is only 20 percent, and you set a 15 percent commission, you have 5 percent left to cover operations, any paid promotion, and actual profit.
Work backward from these numbers. For goods imported from 1688, real landed cost after freight, customs handling, and any agent service fee typically takes up 40 to 60 percent of the selling price, depending on the category. Add platform fees of roughly 2 to 5 percent depending on the platform and listing type. Everything left has to cover commission, any supplemental ads, and your margin. If the spread is not thick enough, do not open an affiliate program until you adjust the selling price or cut the landed cost.
Affiliates and KOCs are two different things
These two terms get lumped together but work quite differently in practice.
Affiliates are anyone with a tracking link who earns a commission when an order comes through their link. They do not need to be known creators. On TikTok Shop and Shopee, thousands of people will sign up for your affiliate program if the commission rate is attractive. Most will do nothing. A small group will generate orders consistently. This model spreads risk and does not require managing individual relationships.
KOCs (Key Opinion Consumers) are real users of the product, making real videos, with their own communities and influence built from personal experience. Unlike celebrity influencers reading a script, KOCs tend to convert better because the content reads as genuine. But you have to find them, reach out, send samples, and manage each relationship.
For 1688 imports in the early stages, open affiliate programs on the platform (set them up and let them run passively) are better for testing a product without much overhead. Active KOC outreach makes more sense once you know the product sells and want to accelerate with specific content.
What commission rate gets creators to sign up
On TikTok Shop Affiliate, consumer goods typically need a rate of 10 to 15 percent or higher before smaller creators find it worth making a video. Below that, your listing disappears into thousands of others that nobody picks up. For low-priced products (under roughly VND 100,000 per unit), the absolute commission per order is so small that few creators will spend time filming for a few thousand dong.
This means low-priced, thin-margin 1688 imports are genuinely difficult to push through KOCs. If you have to keep commissions low to protect margin, you will not attract quality creators. If you set the commission high enough to attract them, you lose the margin. The only exits are: raise the selling price if the product can hold it, reduce landed cost, or pick a product with a thicker margin from the start.
A quick check before you set a commission rate:
- Selling price (A)
- Minus real landed cost (B, with all freight, fees, and shrinkage)
- Minus platform fee (C)
- The result is your gross margin (A minus B minus C)
- The maximum commission you can offer while still making money = gross margin minus the net profit you want to keep per order
If gross margin is 30 percent and you want to keep at least 10 percent net after everything, your commission ceiling is 20 percent. This is a rough check, not a precise accounting, but it is a useful filter before you go live on the affiliate program.
Picking the right KOC for 1688 goods
Booking the wrong KOC is one of the most efficient ways to burn money. A creator with 500,000 followers whose audience does not match your buyer will generate views, not orders. A creator with 20,000 followers whose audience regularly buys household or personal-care goods and watches product reviews may convert far better.
When choosing KOCs for imported 1688 goods, these factors matter more than follower count:
- Audience behavior matches your buyer profile. Not just gender or age bracket, but buying behavior: do they regularly purchase through TikTok Shop, do they review similar goods, do their comments talk about value and quality.
- Order history through their videos, if visible. On TikTok Shop, some creators show order counts per video. This is a more reliable signal than likes or views.
- Sample and booking cost must fit your margin. Sending a free sample is standard. Paying an additional flat fee on top of commission only makes sense for a product that already has a sales signal. Do not pay a booking fee to a KOC when the product has not been tested yet.
- They use the product versus reading from your brief. Creators who genuinely use the item and mention its real drawbacks tend to earn more trust from viewers, even if that is not always convenient for the shop. 1688 goods of reasonable quality usually do not need a script, but they do need to be good enough that the reviewer does not have to pretend.
Tracking results and adjusting
After you open an affiliate program or send samples to KOCs, the first two weeks are for reading signals, not making final calls. Some KOCs post slowly. Some affiliates build consistent orders over several weeks as their videos accumulate organic reach.
After four to six weeks, though, you need to measure real cost against real output:
- Real affiliate cost per order = total commission paid divided by orders from that channel
- Compare against equivalent ad ROAS on the same product to know which channel is actually cheaper
- Return and cancellation rate from affiliate orders: affiliate-driven orders sometimes cancel at a higher rate because buyers were pulled in by a compelling video and the product did not match expectations on arrival
If the cost per order through affiliates runs higher than through ads and you still want to keep the channel, check the commission level and content quality. Affiliates are not automatically cheaper than ads. In some categories, platform ads still outperform because targeting is more precise.
Bottom line
KOCs and affiliates can drive orders with variable cost instead of fixed spend, which fits shops importing from 1688 with limited capital. But commission has to be priced into the margin before you launch, the rate has to be high enough to attract good creators, and the product has to be thick enough to absorb both commission and platform fees. If the margin is not there, opening an affiliate program just burns through the budget faster than doing nothing.