The similar products are drawn from Cartura’s US TikTok Shop catalog, which holds 2,015,753 active listings today.
The six steps below follow the order of a Product Analysis result. Each says what the screen shows, where the figure comes from, and what to look for. The details of every figure are in How Product Analysis works.
1. Start from a product link
Product Analysis starts from a link to a product you could source: a product page on any regional Amazon site, on AliExpress or on Alibaba. It does not take a TikTok Shop link. The point is to set a product you could buy against what already sells on the US TikTok Shop.
If you have no candidate yet, start from demand instead. Discover lists the US TikTok Shop products selling fastest, by weekly sales pace (see How Discover works), and the Products leaderboard ranks listings by estimated GMV, their weekly pace times their price (see Products and Sellers leaderboards). Either can suggest a kind of product to look for on a supplier’s site.
2. Run the scan
Paste the link and the scan runs in three steps:
- Fetching product details reads the product’s title and price from its store page.
- Reading the listing turns the title into a numeric description of its meaning, so that products described in different words can still be matched.
- Finding comparables and prices compares that description with the US TikTok Shop products Cartura tracks, lets the 50 nearest vote for a top-level category (closer products count for more), then picks the similar products from that category and loads the category’s price data.
Each product you scan from a link uses one of your plan’s daily scans; scanning the same product again on the same day does not use another.
3. Read the similar products and their prices
The Similar products table lists US TikTok Shop listings from the matched category, closest to your product first, with each one’s price, lifetime units sold, rating, review count and whether it ships free. You can re-sort by units sold, price, rating or reviews. How many similar products you see depends on your plan.
- Check that each one is really the same product. Matching works on the meaning of titles, so a close match can still differ in size, material, quantity or bundle. Look at the image and title before treating its price as your benchmark.
- Read Sold as lifetime, not recent. A listing with a large sold count may have made most of those sales long ago. Selecting a row opens its details, where plans with detailed product data see its weekly sales pace, the change against the week before, and its price against its average over the last 30 days.
- Look at the spread of prices among the closest matches. It is the price band buyers already accept for this product, which matters more than any single listing’s price.
- Note how established the field is. When the close matches carry thousands of reviews, a new listing starts far behind on social proof; when they carry few, demand may be young or thin.
4. Compare with the category median and price distribution
Above the table, the category median, mean, price range and free-shipping share come from the matched category’s newest weekly price distribution. In it each listing counts once for every unit sold since Cartura’s previous reading of it, and at least once, so the median sits closer to what buyers pay than the middle of the listings would.
The matched category is a top-level one, so it can hold very different products. Treat its median as context and the similar products as the closer comparison. If your planned price sits well above both, you need a reason buyers would pay it; well below both, check that the margin survives. The price history shows whether the category’s weekly median is moving, and the price distribution shows which price bands carry most of the units sold. The guide How to read a TikTok Shop category’s price distribution covers both in depth.
5. Run profit scenarios
The profit calculator answers “how many units at this price to reach this profit”. The price starts at the category median when there is one, the unit cost at the product’s price on its store, and shipping at zero. Profit per unit is the price minus a 6% fee, the unit cost and shipping; the margin is that profit as a share of the price; the units figure is your profit goal divided by the profit per unit, rounded up. The break-even mark shows the price at which profit per unit reaches zero, and the Median and Mean marks jump the price to the category’s figures.
- Replace the starting unit cost with your landed cost: the supplier’s price for your quantity plus freight, duties and packaging. The store price is only a first guess.
- Enter what you will really pay to ship each order. The 6% fee is the calculator’s fixed allowance, not your account’s rate; check your own TikTok Shop fees.
- Try at least three prices: the category median, the price of the closest similar products, and the lowest price you would accept. A product that only works at the highest of these depends on buyers paying more than the field.
Profit scenarios need a plan that includes them; see Pricing.
6. Check who already sells it
Product Analysis does not name the shops behind the similar products. To see them, search the Products leaderboard for words from the product’s title: each row names its shop, and the shop’s page shows its weekly units and estimated GMV, followers, rating and the rest of its catalog. A product sold mostly by one large shop with thousands of reviews is a different bet from one spread across many small shops. The guide How to judge a TikTok Shop seller explains which figures to weigh.
What this method misses
- US only. Cartura covers the US TikTok Shop; the comparison says nothing about other countries’ shops.
- No ad spend. Cartura cannot see what sellers spend on ads, so a listing’s sales may rest on paid traffic you would have to match.
- No creator commission rates. Many TikTok Shop sales come through creators’ videos; the commission a seller pays them is not public and is not in the figures.
- Observations, not TikTok’s numbers. Prices, sold counts and ratings are read from public listings, about once a week per product. Weekly paces and GMV figures are Cartura’s estimates from those readings, not sales or revenue reported by TikTok Shop.
What the dataset covers is described on Cartura’s dataset page. To run a scan yourself, create a free account.