TikTok GMV Max & ROI Protection for your eCommerce Business

If you have been running TikTok Shop ads as an eCommerce strategy, you will want to pay close attention. These new features aren’t just incremental updates, eCommerce businesses strategic game-changers that could significantly impact how you approach advertising and budget allocation in our region. Let’s break it all down.

TikTok is fully committed to GMV Max, and they’ve just introduced ROI Protection—a feature similar to China’s 千川 保本计划. This isn’t just another ad tool; it’s TikTok’s way of saying “we’ve got your back” to serious sellers who follow best practices.

GMV Max is TikTok Shop Advertising Automation solution that optimizes for a seller’s total channel ROI for TikTok Shop. GMV Max is a highly innovative, first of its kind solution that primarily differentiates itself via two unique features:

• GMV Max leverages all available creatives automatically and deploys them in form of a “super campaign”, which does not require any operational inputs from the client
• GMV Max optimizes organic delivery in addition to paid ad traffic, providing advertisers with incremental GMV that would not otherwise be attainable without Product GMV max.

As a result, all orders generated from promoted products, including those from organic content and affiliate orders, will be counted as GMV Max.

*Reminder: GMV Max helps improve the organic traffic of both seller videos and affiliate videos. Affiliate videos receive a commercial content label, and if you choose, you can label your seller videos with a branded content toggle.

What is ROI Protection?

ROI Protection is essentially a safety net for your eCommerce platform. If your GMV Max campaign fails to hit at least 90% of your ROI target despite following all recommended best practices, TikTok automatically issues ad credits to offset your losses.

Formula: Ad Credit = Actual Cost – (Actual Revenue ÷ (0.9 × ROI Target))

• Your actual ROI falls below 90% of your target ROI
• Your campaign has more than 20 daily orders
• You didn’t change your target ROI on that day
• Your campaign wasn’t paused or deleted
• The product isn’t using Max delivery
• Your account remains in good standing

Impact on Southeast Asian Markets

This is huge for our region. TikTok Shop’s GMV in Southeast Asia reached $22.6 billion in 2024, and with these new protections, we’re likely to see even more aggressive scaling from eCommerce businesses who previously held back due to uncertainty.

Strategic Implications for SEA Sellers:

• Confidence in Scaling: The safety net allows for more aggressive budget allocation
• Conversion focus: Focus shifts to achieving consistent 20+ daily orders
• Performance Discipline: Rewards sellers who follow optimization best practices
• Competitive Advantage: Early adopters can gain market share while others hesitate

More Content and less manual optimization

All that matters is how much eCommerce business content you can generate using a blend of own content and affiliate content to feed into the machine that allows GMV Max to pick it up, and this also means less dependence on actual optimization techniques as the only variables here become ROI Target, Budgets and the products you select.

An overview of how Commerceplus brings Content teams, Digital media specialist and eCommerce platforms team together to create a constant feedback loop for iteration and improvements.

For GMV Max to work. Focus on these 3 areas

Product

1. Good Product
2. Pricing
3. Promotions
4. Brand

GMV Max

1. Setting the ROI Target
2. Managing the Budget
3. Product Set
4. Constant new content to add to the pool

Content Source

1. Brand
2. Story Video
3. Affiliate

ROI Optimization Corner