A seller survey published this week reports that 55 percent of marketplace sellers are now active on TikTok Shop, and that profit margin has displaced net sales as the metric they judge a marketplace by. The second finding is the more consequential one, and the two are connected.
Sellers spent the past year adding channels. They are now counting what those channels earn rather than what they turn over, which is what operators do when expansion has been paid for and has not yet paid back.
Who was asked, and by whom
The research is ChannelEngine’s Marketplace Seller Trends Report 2026, its second annual edition. The company states the study “covers 550 ecommerce decision-makers across France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US.”
Note the sample precisely: 550, not more than 550, which is how the figure has been reported in places. Five countries, four of them European, one of them the United States, with no published split between them. A finding about European seller behaviour drawn from this cannot be separated from the American respondents inside it.
One thing is missing that should not be. The report does not publish a fieldwork window anywhere, so there is no way to know when these 550 people were asked. In a year when marketplace fee structures, cross-border duties and channel economics all moved, a survey that could have been fielded in January or in August is a different document in each case. Treat every percentage below as undated.
The interest declaration matters more than usual here. ChannelEngine sells marketplace integration software to exactly the sellers it surveyed, and the two headline findings, that sellers are on more marketplaces and need better visibility of profitability per marketplace, both describe problems its product addresses. That does not make the numbers wrong. It means they are a vendor’s survey of its own market, and should carry that label wherever they are repeated.
From the publisher
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The TikTok Shop number
The company’s wording is that “55% of sellers are now active on TikTok Shop, either domestically or internationally.” The qualifier is doing work: active includes a seller who has listed internationally and made little of it, which is a lower bar than a functioning channel.
Even discounted, 55 percent is past the point where a seller can treat the channel as an experiment their competitors have not tried. This is also the only recent number that puts European TikTok Shop adoption on a survey footing rather than a platform announcement, which is why it is worth having despite its provenance.
What it cannot tell you is whether those sellers are earning. Adoption and performance are different measurements, and a survey that asks whether a company is active on a channel will always produce a higher number than one that asks whether the channel pays. Given that the same respondents have just told the same survey they are now judging channels on margin, the gap between those two questions is the most interesting thing in the report and it is not measured.
Tool comparison · FastMoss vs Kalodata
A survey tells you how many sellers are on TikTok Shop. It does not tell you whether your category earns there, which is the only version of the question that decides anything. FastMoss and Kalodata both measure category and product performance on the platform directly.
Comparison coming soon
FTC disclosure: we may earn a commission if you buy through links on this page. It costs you nothing and does not change what we recommend.
The metric changed, and that is the story
Profit margin per marketplace is now cited by 33 percent of respondents as the top success measure, up from 31 percent the year before. Net sales has been displaced from first place.
Two things are worth saying about that. The shift is real but small, two percentage points inside a 550-person sample, and a change of that size should be read as a direction rather than a jump. And 33 percent as the leading answer means two thirds of sellers still judge a marketplace by something else, which is a less tidy picture than “sellers have shifted to profitability”.
What gives the finding weight is the company it keeps. In the same survey, 49 percent of sellers added two or three new marketplaces over the past year, and the share running seven or more platforms grew from 34 to 39 percent. Sellers expanded hard and then changed the question they ask about expansion. That sequence is what a portfolio looks like shortly before it gets pruned.
The seven-or-more figure is the one an operator should sit with. Running seven marketplaces means seven fee structures, seven fulfilment arrangements, seven sets of listing requirements and seven places where stock can be oversold. Very few teams are resourced for that, and almost none were resourced for it at the point the seventh channel was added.
Expansion of that kind is rarely a strategy. It is usually the accumulated residue of individual decisions that each looked cheap, taken over a couple of years by people who have since moved on, and the reason margin per marketplace suddenly matters is that somebody has finally added up what the portfolio costs to run.
The AI figure, and what it is not
The survey reports 82 percent of organisations adopting or considering AI in marketplace operations, and separately that implementing AI is the biggest stated priority, named by 26 percent.
Adopting or considering is one of the weakest constructions in survey design, because considering costs nothing and almost nobody answers no to it. The 26 percent priority figure is the more informative of the two, and it is less than a third.
Set against the 33 percent who now lead on margin per marketplace, the picture is of an operator population that has worked out what it needs to measure and has not yet worked out how. That gap is where most of this year’s marketplace tooling spend is going to land, sensibly or otherwise.
Tool comparison · FastMoss vs Kalodata
Working out margin per marketplace starts with knowing what a product actually sells for and how fast, channel by channel. That data is the input, and it rarely comes from the channel itself. FastMoss and Kalodata both supply it for TikTok Shop.
Comparison coming soon
FTC disclosure: we may earn a commission if you buy through links on this page. It costs you nothing and does not change what we recommend.
For the business operator
The useful exercise this week is the one the survey implies rather than the one it reports. Work out contribution margin for each marketplace you are on, after channel fees, fulfilment, advertising and returns, and rank them. Most operators who do this for the first time find one channel carrying the portfolio and two or three that have never covered their own overhead.
Returns is the line most often missing, and on fashion and footwear it is frequently the line that decides the answer.
If the ranking says a channel does not work, the decision is usually not to close it. It is to stop spending management attention and advertising budget defending it while the channel that earns is under-resourced.
From the consumer’s side
A shopper does not see any of this, but they feel the consequence within a quarter or two. Sellers optimising for margin rather than volume discount less, run fewer loss-leading promotions and let thin-margin lines go out of stock rather than restocking them.
The effect on the customer is narrower ranges and steadier prices, which is a better experience for someone who buys deliberately and a worse one for someone who has been trained to wait for the deep discount. Brands that have built their demand on discounting are the ones this hurts, because a margin-led portfolio and a discount-trained customer base cannot both survive contact.
The three-line version
If you run the marketplace portfolio, rank your channels by contribution margin after fees, fulfilment, advertising and returns before the next planning round. The line to take upward is that the industry has moved from counting revenue to counting margin per channel, and our own ranking either already exists or is a fortnight of work.
If you have just taken on marketplaces or digital, the gap this exposes is that channel expansion is usually approved on revenue forecasts and reviewed on revenue actuals, so nobody has ever been asked whether a channel earns. Being the person who asks is uncomfortable and is the job.
If you sign the budget, read this as vendor research before you read it as evidence. The company publishing it sells the software that solves the problem it identifies. Refuse any tooling proposal that cites these numbers without first showing you your own margin by channel, which costs nothing to produce.
Sources
ChannelEngine, Marketplace Seller Trends Report 2026 — https://www.channelengine.com/en/blog/2026-marketplace-seller-research-findings-profitability-and-ai
Ecommerce News Europe — https://ecommercenews.eu/marketplace-sellers-shift-focus-to-profitability/