How to sell on TikTok LIVE: the complete playbook
Daily engines, showcase spikes, the 15-minute round and education-led selling, from the team live every day.
A disclosure before anything else: we run one. Our TikTok LIVE service broadcasts every day from our own studios, and it is the floor the $2.7m single-LIVE world record came off. So this guide has a bias, and the way we have kept it honest is the same way we keep our agency list honest: every test below is one you should run on us too.
What a TikTok LIVE agency actually does
The job is broader than pointing a camera at a presenter. A LIVE programme is a trading channel, and running one means owning six jobs at once:
- Strategy and offer architecture. Which products, at which price points, in which bundles, against which trading moments. The offer decides the ceiling before anyone goes on air.
- Run-of-show. The broadcast planned to 15-minute beats: segments, demos, offer drops, engagement loops and pin timing.
- Hosts. Casting, training and managing the people on camera, certified on the product and measured on what they sell.
- Production. Studio, set, lighting and camera to broadcast standard, with backdrops that rotate so the room never looks the same two weeks running.
- Moderation and traffic. A moderator in the comments, pre-heat content before the show and paid amplification to fill the room.
- Measurement. Per-minute scorecards during the broadcast, post-show read-outs after it, and next-event learnings that compound.
Plenty of agencies genuinely deliver one or two of these. The gap between "does LIVE" and "is a LIVE operation" is whether all six run in-house, on infrastructure the agency owns. That is what the next four tests check.
The four things that separate a real LIVE operation
1. Studios they own, not hire
Broadcasting at commercial cadence needs somewhere to broadcast from: dedicated floors, sets that rotate weekly, lighting and camera infrastructure, and room for crew. We run 12 studios across London and Manchester because a daily engine cannot be improvised around a hired room and a ring light. This is also the easiest claim on any agency's site to verify — ask to visit. A real operation will put you in front of a live show on the day you turn up.
2. Hosts they train, not book
The person on camera decides the conversion rate, hour after hour. Booking a presenter with a nice reel is not the same as fielding a host who is certified on your full SKU list, drilled on AOV laddering and bundle framing, and scored on GMV per hour. Our answer is a training engine behind a roster of 180 vetted hosts, working from per-product call scripts with a moderator and live strategist in the room — and no host goes live without passing. Whoever you hire, ask how deep the bench is: a programme built on one great freelancer stops when that freelancer does.
3. A daily cadence, not a calendar of one-offs
LIVE compounds. A dependable schedule builds a habit for the audience and a signal for the algorithm, which is why the strongest brand rooms broadcast 40 to 80 hours a month and the biggest UK rooms run 50 to 60 shows in that time. It is also why we are on air seven days a week: 2000+ hours live a month across 40+ brands including CeraVe, Huel, TRESemmé, Liquid I.V. and Vaseline. An agency that only proposes launch-moment broadcasts is selling you events. The revenue is in the engine, with showcase events layered on top for the peaks.
4. Scheduling and reporting run on data
A real operation treats every broadcast as a funnel: enter-room rate gets viewers in, engagement holds them, click-through rate pins the right product at the right moment and click-to-order closes it. Slots are chosen and moved on what the performance data shows, not on when the studio happens to be free. We track every minute of every stream through LiveHost, our own live commerce platform, with scorecards on ERR, AVD, CTR and GMV per hour — the four numbers we break down in our LIVE metrics guide. Ask any agency to show you last week's post-show read-out. The dashboard exists or it does not.
The four tests, in photos: a Manchester studio mid-broadcast, the P.Louise set as the record broke, and the scorecards running behind every show.
What to ask before you hire one
Seven questions, one call. None of them can be answered well by a pitch deck alone.
- How many hours were you live last month, and for whom? A real operation answers in hours and named brands without checking.
- Can I stand on the studio floor this week? The visit is the audit. A working broadcast floor cannot be staged for you at short notice; a meeting room with a ring light can.
- Who trains your hosts, and how are they scored? You are listening for certification on the SKU list and GMV per hour, not follower counts and showreels.
- When did you last move a slot because of the data? Data-led scheduling leaves evidence. So does its absence.
- What does your post-show report contain? Ask to see a real one, anonymised. Two minutes of dashboard beats an hour of showreel.
- Which of your results are spikes, and which are engines? One big event eighteen months ago is a different claim from a room that compounds month on month. Good agencies volunteer the difference.
- What happens in month one? The credible answer is specific: offer architecture, host casting and certification, set build, a ramped cadence and a first read-out. The vague answer is a content calendar.
What good looks like
Benchmarks make the questions sharper. A well-run daily engine trades at around £300 of GMV per hour in month one and builds towards £600 per hour by month six; a showcase should target £4,000+ per hour, with the biggest events clearing £20,000+. The full working is in our guide to selling on TikTok LIVE.
And this is what the top of the range looks like, with dates and names. The ceiling: P.Louise's $2.7m in a single 14-hour broadcast, the Western world record, with 40m impressions on the day. The engine: Glow For It's 400% growth in a year on daily LIVEs, including a £100k single show. The tentpole: The Beauty Crop's £120k+ twelve-hour showcase at a 28% click-through rate, proof the format works well beyond the record-holders. Every LIVE case study, including the ones that started small, is on our LIVE work page.
Free resource
the LIVE run of show.
The hour-by-hour structure a professional broadcast runs on: segments, engagement loops, the pin schedule and offer timing. Read it before any agency pitch — if their run-of-show is thinner than the free template, keep looking.
Get the run of showWant the wider decision first? Our top 7 UK TikTok Shop agencies compares the full field.
One last thing on hierarchy. A LIVE agency is one specialism inside a bigger question — who should run your TikTok Shop channel — and the two decisions deserve separate scrutiny. For the specialism, everything we run, from daily engines to showcase builds, is on the TikTok LIVE service page. For the wider channel, start with our complete UK agency guide. Either way, apply the four tests. They are cheap to run and expensive to skip.