TikTok & Salesforce integration: Tips for a smooth integration 

Our first and foremost tip for brands tackling this integration project is to anticipate a considerable lift. In our experience, a lot of work goes into planning, development, testing, and ultimately supporting the solution. It’s important to set reasonable expectations around timeline, effort, and resources.

Things to consider when planning timelines include:

• Think about TikTok Shop as an additional order management integration. TikTok Shop will be a secondary source of orders, so you’ll need to plan how this affects data flows and other systems within your Salesforce instance. 
• TikTok has yet to be designed for multi-users/admins. That means there is a single set of credentials (protected by 2FA) that everyone must share. When working as a dispersed team, this seemingly small detail creates a lot of extra coordination. 
• The initial onboarding process takes at least a week. No development can start until you’ve checked off this step, and it’s one more thing that can delay momentum. 

Of course, how long this takes depends on your business processes, familiarity with Salesforce, and integration expertise. 

If you’ve never done a TikTok-Salesforce integration before, expect it to take three to four months. At DEPT®, we’ve refined the process and, as of December 2023, have the timeline down to about eight weeks.  

While many commerce platforms treat integrations differently, most enterprise commerce platforms require individual business accounts for staging, pre-prod, and prod. This accounts for three rounds of testing. You might also need to do a full regression test before you go live. 

For Peter Thomas Roth, we integrated their TikTok Shop with Salesforce Commerce Cloud in the summer of 2023. We tested all three environments, which required a dedicated QA team working for several weeks alongside our developers. This testing was necessary to identify bugs and data flows before pushing it live.