TikTok Shop Users Are Furious Over the Verification Process and Want Answers

The Gist:

• TikTok is making both buyers and sellers on TikTok Shop verify their accounts over and over for reasons that remain unclear.
• The feature seems to be broken, and it's making it impossible for shop owners to register their shops and for prospective buyers to purchase anything.
• People have taken to TikTok itself to start complaining about the problem.

Frequently, TikTok markets itself as a platform that is good for content creators. It wants to help these creators find ways to make money, and some of its efforts in this space have been enormously successful. Unfortunately, not everything that TikTok has introduced in this space has offered a seamless user experience.

The TikTok Shop feature was designed by the platform to give users the chance to sell their goods right on TikTok. You can make a video about a product you've made, and users can buy it without even leaving TikTok. Unfortunately, actually setting up a TikTok Shop has proven more difficult than many users had hoped.

Many users who are trying to set up TikTok Shops have found that the company's verification process is a nightmare. Basically, TikTok requires you to register your business legally and provide documentation proving that you've done so. The exact requirements will vary by country, and will also likely include some basic information about you and your business.

Many users believe that they have completed their verification process successfully, only to discover that TikTok has rejected their application without offering a clear explanation as to why. As a result, these users can't open a TikTok Shop. They're stranded attempting to get their application approved without even really understanding what was wrong with it to begin with.

Somewhat ironically, many of the people who are experiencing this issue have posted on TikTok itself to complain about the problem and ask their followers for help.

What's even worse is that the problem isn't just impacting sellers. Buyers are also finding that they can't complete purchases through TikTok because the app says that some piece of information in their profile isn't valid. For many, it seems to be their zip code.

Even worse, no one has found any sort of concrete solution to this problem yet. Instead, users are banging their heads against the wall trying to figure out why TikTok Shop seems to be so broken.

Ultimately, it seems like the explanation might simply be that TikTok Shop needs to a major overhaul before it will be usable by both sellers and buyers.

Plenty of people have undoubtedly flagged the many problems they have faced when trying to use the feature. Until TikTok makes some sort of announcement taking responsibility of the issue, though, many users are wondering whether it's somehow on them. Thankfully, the problem is widespread enough that that doesn't seem to be the case.