What a TikTok Shop operations manager actually does every week

I have run TikTok Shop operations since April 2023 — first for a multi-shop US seller, then at a Partner Center agency, and now across a portfolio of 30+ brands. The job title sounds vague. The work is not. It is the same checklist, every week, in the same order.

This is that checklist. If you are hiring a TikTok Shop operations manager, this is what the job should cover.

Monday: account health first

Before anything else, I check account health in Seller Center. Violations, warnings, policy notices, late-shipment and cancellation rates. A violation that sits unanswered for a week costs more than any promotion earns.

• Any new violation gets read, understood and, if it is wrong, appealed the same day.
• Any listing that was flagged gets fixed or pulled.
• Any metric that is drifting — late shipments, cancellations — gets a named cause and an owner.

My honest take: account health is the job nobody sees until it breaks. A shop with great creators and a suspended account sells nothing.

Listings, pricing and stock

Listings drift. Somebody changes a price in one place and not another. A variant goes out of stock and the listing keeps getting traffic. Once a week I go through:

• Listings — titles, images and keywords that match how buyers actually search
• Pricing — consistent across variants, and correct against any live promotion
• Stock — anything close to running out gets flagged to the supplier early

Promotions: the calendar, not the scramble

Flash deals, vouchers and TikTok Shop campaign sign-ups work best when they are planned a few weeks ahead. I keep a simple promotions calendar: what is live, what is scheduled, what campaign deadlines are coming, and what stock each promotion needs. A voucher that goes live a day late is a week of lost momentum.

Samples and creators

Operations and affiliates overlap here. Sample requests need approving, shipped samples need tracking, and creators who have the product need to post. Even when a separate affiliate manager owns the program, operations owns the part where the product physically gets to the creator.

Suppliers and fulfilment

For most of the shops I have run, the supplier is overseas, often in China. That means stock decisions are made weeks before they matter. Every week I check inventory against what is selling and what promotions are coming, confirm open orders and lead times, and follow up on any quality issue from customer reviews. Order problems, returns and customer messages get cleared, not parked.

Friday: the one-page report

The week ends with a short report the brand owner can read in two minutes:

1. What moved — GMV, orders, top products and top creators
2. What broke — violations, stock-outs, late shipments, anything that cost money
3. What I fix next — three items, in order

No 20-slide deck. A founder should be able to act on it the same day.

Write it down

The last part of the job is the one that makes it scale: SOPs. Every fix that repeats gets written down, so the next person — or the next shop — does not start from zero. When a task shows up in the SOP list every single week, that is my signal that it should be automated. I build those tools myself; that is a separate post.

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If you want a TikTok Shop operations manager, or want to know whether your current setup covers this list, email me at orliejohndeferia@gmail.com. Tell me how many shops you run and what broke last month.