TikTok Shop Affiliate APIs: Creator, Partner, and Seller

Most TikTok Shop API guides start with orders and inventory, because that is where every seller integration starts. But the API surface that actually decides whether an affiliate program scales is a different one — the affiliate family. TikTok Shop splits it into three distinct APIs, one per role: the Affiliate Seller API for brands, the Affiliate Partner API for agencies and TikTok Shop Partners, and the Affiliate Creator API for creator-side tools. The three families overlap in vocabulary — collabs, samples, links, orders — but they are separate authorization surfaces with separate endpoints, and confusing them is the most common reason an affiliate integration stalls in week one. This guide maps all three: what each role can automate, where the flows connect, and what an operator should wire up first.

Three affiliate APIs, three roles

The cleanest way to understand the affiliate surface is to forget features for a moment and think about who is holding the token.

The Affiliate Seller API (paths under /affiliate_seller/, current generation 202412) is authorized against a seller's own shop. It automates the program the brand runs itself: finding creators on the marketplace, generating target collaboration links, handling sample requests, messaging creators, and searching the shop's affiliate orders.

The Affiliate Partner API (paths under /affiliate_partner/, generation 202405) is authorized against a partner entity — an agency or TikTok Shop Partner operating campaigns on behalf of sellers. Its shape is campaign-centric: create a campaign, attach and review products, publish it, and track the orders it drives.

The Affiliate Creator API (paths under /affiliate_creator/, also 202405) is authorized against a creator account. It powers creator-side tooling: managing the product showcase, generating promotion links, searching open collaborations and sample applications, and posting shoppable video.

These are not three views of one API — they are three doors, and the door you enter through is fixed by your app's authorization type. A seller token cannot call partner endpoints, and a creator integration cannot review sample applications. Before you write any affiliate code, decide which role your integration genuinely is, because that decision picks your entire endpoint family. All three ride on the same auth layer — access tokens, request signing, and (for seller calls) shop context — which we cover in the authentication and request signing guide.

Affiliate Seller API: open and target collabs

The seller domain is where an operator lives day to day, and its endpoints trace the outreach loop almost exactly.

Start with discovery. Creator marketplace search (POST /affiliate_seller/202412/marketplace/creators/search) is the programmatic version of browsing the creator marketplace: filter the creator pool, page through candidates, and feed the results into your own scoring rather than eyeballing profiles one at a time. This is the endpoint that turns creator sourcing from a browsing session into a pipeline — the raw material for the kind of tiered creator lists we maintain in a creator CRM.

Then come the two collaboration modes, and the distinction matters operationally:

• Open collaboration is a standing offer. The product sits in the affiliate marketplace at a posted commission rate, and any eligible creator can pick it up. It is passive, broad, and entirely rate-driven.
• Target collaboration is an invitation. You choose specific creators and extend terms directly — typically a higher negotiated rate for creators you actually want. This is where deliberate outreach programs live.

The API encodes the split. Generate Target Collaboration Link (POST /affiliate_seller/202412/target_collaboration/links/generate) produces the link that routes a specific creator into your target collab flow — the artifact you drop into an outreach message so the creator lands on your invitation rather than a generic product page. Alongside it, Generate Affiliate Product Promotion Link (POST /affiliate_seller/202412/product_promotion/links/generate) creates product promotion links for the broader case.

The seller domain also includes a messaging surface — POST /affiliate_seller/202412/messages/send for IM messages, an image upload endpoint, and a mark-conversation-read call — plus a Compass export-task family (POST /affiliate_seller/202412/compass/export_tasks, task list, and file download) for pulling affiliate analytics out as offline exports. Together that is the whole loop: find, invite, converse, measure. One caution from running this at agency scale: nearly every endpoint that matters here is a write. Sending messages and generating invitations are real actions against real creators, so anything automated should run draft-first with a human approving sends — a burned creator relationship does not have a retry endpoint.

Sample request deeplinks and approvals

Free samples are the fuel of most affiliate programs, and TikTok Shop treats the sample flow as a first-class API citizen rather than a Seller Center-only queue. Three seller-domain endpoints cover it:

• Sample request deeplink (GET /affiliate_seller/202412/sample_requests/deeplink) returns a deeplink that drops a creator directly into the sample request flow. Embed it in outreach so the creator's next tap is a sample request, not a search for your shop.
• Search sample applications (POST /affiliate_seller/202412/sample_applications/search) pulls the queue of pending requests programmatically — who asked, for what, and when.
• Review sample applications (POST /affiliate_seller/202412/sample_applications/review) is the decision endpoint: approve or reject applications in bulk instead of clicking through them one by one.

The operational win here is queue latency. A sample request that sits unreviewed for days is a creator who has moved on to another brand's product, and at any real volume the manual queue becomes the program's bottleneck — a failure mode we broke down in detail in the sample approval queue post. The API pattern that fixes it: poll the application search on a short interval, score each request against your own criteria (follower band, category fit, past attributed sales), auto-draft a decision, and let a human approve the batch. The review call itself commits inventory and shipping spend, so keep it gated — automate the triage, not the final yes.

Affiliate Partner API: campaign management

The partner domain looks nothing like the seller domain, and that is the point. Where sellers think in creators and invitations, partners think in campaigns — structured containers of products, commission terms, and creator participation that an agency runs on behalf of one or more shops.

The lifecycle is explicit in the endpoints:

• Create a campaign: POST /affiliate_partner/202405/campaigns
• Edit it: POST /affiliate_partner/202405/campaigns/edit
• Review campaign products: POST /affiliate_partner/202405/campaigns/products/review
• Publish: POST /affiliate_partner/202405/campaigns/publish
• List and inspect: GET /affiliate_partner/202405/campaigns and GET /affiliate_partner/202405/campaigns/{campaign_id}
• Generate campaign product links: POST /affiliate_partner/202405/campaigns/products/links/generate

Note the shape: create and publish are separate calls. A campaign is drafted, its products are attached and reviewed, and only then does publish make it live. That staging is a gift for automation — you can build campaign assembly as a fully automated pipeline and reserve the publish call as the single human-approved action, which is exactly how we recommend wiring it.

The partner domain also carries its own order tracking, split into two programs: CAP order search (POST /affiliate_partner/202405/cap/orders/search) and TAP order search (POST /affiliate_partner/202405/tap/orders/search) — the creator agency program and partner-side affiliate order feeds. If you are an agency reporting attributed GMV and commission across client shops, these two searches are your ground truth, and they are the endpoints to wire into reporting before you automate anything else in this domain.

Access is the practical hurdle. Partner endpoints require a partner authorization — an approved agency or TikTok Shop Partner app with affiliate scopes — which is a separate application path from a seller app. Brands automating their own program should not chase partner access; everything a single shop needs lives in the seller domain.

Affiliate Creator API: showcases and links

The creator domain is the mirror image of the seller domain, and even if you never build creator-side tooling, reading it tells you what the creators you work with can see and automate.

The core object is the showcase — the creator's curated product shelf. The API gives it full CRUD-style management: GET /affiliate_creator/202405/showcase/products to read it, POST on the same path to add products, and DELETE to remove them. A creator tool can programmatically rotate products in and out of the showcase as campaigns start and end.

Around the showcase sit the discovery and participation surfaces:

• Open collaboration product search (POST /affiliate_creator/202405/open_collaboration/products/search) — the creator-side view of the open marketplace: find products worth promoting and their posted rates.
• Target collaboration search (POST /affiliate_creator/202405/target_collaborations/search) — the creator's inbox of direct invitations, the receiving end of the seller's target collab links.
• Sample application search (POST /affiliate_creator/202405/sample_applications/search) — the creator's view of their own sample requests and statuses.
• Profile (GET /affiliate_creator/202405/profile) — the creator's own affiliate profile data.

Then the content path: general link generation (POST /affiliate_creator/202405/links/general/generate) for promotion links, and a two-step shoppable video flow — upload the file (POST /affiliate_creator/202405/shoppable_videos/files/upload), then post it (POST /affiliate_creator/202405/shoppable_videos/post). That last pair matters strategically: it means product-tagged video publishing can be tooling-assisted end to end, which is why serious creators respond well to brands that make the collab-to-content path frictionless. For a seller, the takeaway is empathy-as-strategy — every step your program adds between invitation and posted video is a step the creator's own tooling cannot smooth over for you.

Affiliate order search and attribution

Attribution is where the three families reconverge, because each role gets its own order feed of the same underlying commerce:

• Sellers: POST /affiliate_seller/202412/orders/search — every affiliate-attributed order on the shop, the feed that answers which creators are actually driving sales.
• Partners: the CAP and TAP order searches above — attributed orders across the campaigns the partner operates.
• Creators: POST /affiliate_creator/202405/orders/search — the creator's own attributed orders and earnings.

Treat these like any high-volume order sync: pull on a trailing update-time window, ingest idempotently, and page carefully — the same discipline we laid out in the Orders API guide applies here unchanged. Affiliate order search is the single highest-leverage read in the whole affiliate surface, because it converts your program from anecdotes ("she posted and it did well") into a ledger: attributed GMV per creator, per product, per collaboration type, over time.

Two attribution cautions from operating this. First, attributed GMV at order time is not settled commission — returns, cancellations, and adjustments land later, so reconcile the affiliate feed against settlement data from the Finance API before anyone treats a creator leaderboard as a payout sheet. Second, keep the raw responses. When a creator disputes their numbers — and at scale, someone eventually will — the difference between re-deriving from stored API responses and shrugging is the relationship.

What agencies automate first

Running affiliate programs across many shops has taught us a consistent sequencing. Automate in this order:

• 1. Affiliate order search, read-only. Before you automate a single outreach action, get attribution flowing into your own store. Everything downstream — creator scoring, sample-approval criteria, commission decisions — depends on this ledger existing.
• 2. Marketplace creator search into a scored pipeline. Replace browsing with a nightly pull that feeds your creator database, so outreach targets come from data rather than vibes.
• 3. Sample application triage. Poll the queue, auto-score, human-approve. This is usually the fastest payback in the whole surface because queue latency is the silent killer of creator momentum.
• 4. Target collab link generation inside outreach. Generate the link per creator at message-draft time so every invitation is one tap from acceptance.
• 5. Campaign assembly (partners only), with publish gated. Draft campaigns programmatically; let a human press publish.

The common thread: reads run free, writes run gated. Collab invitations, sample approvals, messages, and campaign publishes are commitments to real people and real inventory, and the API will happily let a bug make ten thousand of them. Draft-first automation with human approval at the send boundary gets you nearly all the leverage with none of the blast radius.

One housekeeping note: affiliate endpoint paths are versioned by generation (202412 for seller, 202405 for partner and creator at the time of writing), and generations move. Always confirm the current versioned path, required scopes, and request fields in the TikTok Shop Partner Center documentation before shipping.

If you would rather have the program than the integration project, this is the machinery our TikTok Shop management team already operates for brands — creator sourcing, sample flows, outreach, and attribution as a running system. Talk to us about where your affiliate program is stuck.