TikTok Shop
A spreadsheet layout for TikTok Shop order tracking
Most order spreadsheets are built by adding a column every time something goes wrong. After a year you have forty columns, six of which you read.
Here is a layout designed the other way round: from what you look at, in the order you look at it.
The scanning block: columns A to E
These are the columns your eye lands on, so they carry the things that drive a decision.
- A - Ready-to-ship deadline. Not the order date. The deadline, because that is what sorts your day
- B - Order date. For context and for filtering by month
- C - TikTok order id. Your dedupe key and the thing you quote in support
- D - Item. Short enough to recognise at a glance
- E - Status. One word: to buy, bought, shipped, delivered, problem
If you can answer "what needs doing today" from these five columns alone, the layout is working.
The supplier block: columns F to J
Everything about the purchase side, kept together so you can see an order half-done.
- Supplier order id
- Cost paid
- Tracking number
- Carrier
- First scan date
That last column earns its place. An empty first-scan date two days after upload means the tracking number is wrong, and that is a problem you want to find before the buyer does.
The money block: columns K to N
Selling price, platform fees, supplier cost, margin. Keep margin as a formula rather than a typed number so it cannot go stale when a fee changes.
One warning: the selling price on the order is provisional. Promotions and fee adjustments land later. Treat this block as an estimate until settlement, and do not make stocking decisions on it alone.
Rules that keep it usable at scale
- One row per order line, not per order - partial shipments need somewhere to live
- Never merge cells; it breaks every filter and sort you will want later
- Statuses come from a dropdown, not free text, or you will have four spellings of "shipped"
- Dates as real dates, not text, or sorting lies to you
- Put the deadline in conditional formatting - red when today, amber when tomorrow
What not to add
Buyer name and full address do not need to live in the main sheet. They are needed once, at purchase, and after that they are personal data sitting in a file you share around. Keep them retrievable rather than permanent.
The test of this layout is whether a stranger could sit down at it and know what to do first. If they would have to ask, the first five columns are wrong.