What is TikTok’s GMV MAX?

In the TikTok e-commerce landscape, GMV MAX is fundamentally transforming the rules of advertising. GMV MAX is referred to as “Maximizing Transaction Value,” and it is essentially a fully automated advertising mechanism based on deep learning.

Unlike traditional advertising tools, it no longer confines sellers to key phrases and time slots; instead, it calculates the entire advertising process through algorithms, allowing machines to replace human decision-making, ensuring that each flow can generate the highest possible value.

The Fundamental Differences Between GMV MAX and Traditional Ads

TikTok’s advertising ecosystem, which was launched at the end of 2023, aims to shift from “human optimization” to “algorithm-driven” strategies. This transformation is driven by a strong demand for advertising effectiveness.

Strategic Direction Changes

After July 15, 2025, TikTok stores will fully transition to GMV MAX.

Currently, the official has gradually reduced the flow authority of manual advertising, and in markets like Pakistan, the share of traditional ads has dropped from 60% to 35%. More importantly, stores using GMV MAX can achieve dedicated flow pools, which include a higher conversion rate of “purchase intent users.”

However, the transition type does not have a price tag, and we observe three key pain points in the process of using GMV MAX:

1. Control Rights and Effectiveness Discrepancy

When a certain clothing cross-border seller allocates 70% of their budget to GMV MAX, their ROI increases from 1.8 to 2.6, but they completely lose control over advertising creativity. The system’s automatically generated materials still have a high conversion rate, but they do not align with brand positioning.

2. Data Transparency Decrease

Traditional Ads can display every key phrase’s performance, while GMV MAX only provides “quality,” “average,” and other generic flow classifications. For cross-border sellers, the overall GMV increased by 20%, but it is impossible to determine which products are genuinely profitable.

3. Learning Cost Transition

In the past, it was necessary to train advertising optimization experts, but now it is required to learn how to “train algorithms.” The practical experience in the Indian market shows that the system “stabilizes” after three weeks of data, and only then will the results improve.

How Does GMV MAX Affect Advertising Costs?

As an automated advertising tool launched by TikTok, GMV MAX’s impact on advertising costs needs to be assessed based on the type of advertising, placement stages, and industry characteristics, while also considering the different time periods that generate different characteristics.

Cold Start Period Advertising Cost Fluctuations

Due to the lack of historical data for new stores or new products, the system struggles to establish models, and the initial period may experience lower conversion rates and unstable effectiveness issues, requiring natural flow accumulation user data (such as short video types, live streaming interactions), otherwise, it is difficult to reach the expected ROI target and may be cut off.

Material Production Pressure Increases

GMV MAX relies on the system’s automatic capture of materials, and if the material quality or update frequency is insufficient (such as daily updates <3 items), it will lead to a decrease in flow acquisition effectiveness, subsequently pushing up the cost of each conversion. Enriching content templates can effectively enhance the material’s brightness, but attention must be paid to the cost of managing multiple accounts (recommended to use tools like DuoPlus Cloud Mobile for such multi-account management, which can control equipment costs)

Long-Term Operational Cost Reduction

GMV MAX breaks the cost flow and natural flow’s cut-off, through collaborative promotion of free flow share, OCPC mechanism dynamic adjustment pricing, achieving ROI targets and cost stabilization, and automated operations can replace manual selection, targeting, and creative adjustments.

What Advantages Does GMV MAX Offer?

For cross-border sellers, GMV MAX brings not only tool upgrades but also operational model innovations.

1. Full-Chain Automated Advertising

GMV MAX realizes the full flow automation from advertising creation to optimization through AI algorithms, including automatic selection of advertising positions (such as TikTok dynamics, search, store tag pages, etc.), intelligent matching high conversion user groups, and real-time adjustment of pricing strategies. Compared to traditional Ads that require manual settings for CPC/CPM, GMV MAX directly optimizes based on GMV (total transaction value) as the target, reducing the manual forecast of the same time to enhance advertising precision.

2. Flow Acquisition Effectiveness Enhancement

• Covering more advertising positions: Integrating short videos, live streaming, product cards, and other multiple scene flows, the system automatically distributes forecasts to high-efficiency channels. Data shows that sellers using GMV MAX have an average GMV increase of 30%.
• Intelligent flow distribution: Based on LSTM neural network forecasting flow peaks, some Southeast Asian sellers find that during non-peak periods, they still achieve a 23% increase in orders.

3. ROI Dynamic Optimization

• Dynamic pricing mechanism: The system automatically adjusts prices based on user value, prioritizing high customer unit prices and high repeat purchase users. For example, the ROI of the beauty brand “LuxSkin” from Southeast Asia increased from 1:2.1 to 1:3.4.
• Long-tail product exposure:

FAQ

How many stores can a single advertising account bind?

Currently, there are cross-border sellers who have tested, and a single account can bind 4-5 stores, but the exact quantity limit is still unclear.

Can a video contain multiple products from the same store? Can this material be captured?

When a video contains multiple products from the same store, it does not affect the advertising material’s capture, but a video containing multiple products from different stores cannot be captured.

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