What actually sets the total on a seeding quote?

The agency fee is the first number anyone reads on a seeding quote and the last one that moves the total. Committed volume, units shipped, round length and the cost of getting product to a US creator do that.

Pulse Seeding at tempo commits between 50 and 1,000 public posts. The committed volume is therefore the first cell to read in a quote, and nothing else can be priced while it stays empty.

Read the word commitment literally too: fifty committed means fifty public posts rather than fifty parcels, and that difference sets both the dispatch volume and the scale of replacement outreach.

Inside the agency fee sit creator selection and outreach, dispatch management, post verification, and replacement outreach when a post does not happen. Outside it sit the product itself and everything it costs to get that product to a creator front door in the United States.

The two items published guidance names as separate are VAT and product shipping. Leave those out of a quote and they reappear on the invoice.

Once volume is fixed, the number of units and the freight scale follow from it. A total exists from that point on, and any figure quoted before it will move.

Posted volume and dispatched volume get folded into one cell more often than any other pair on a seeding quote. They are not the same number, and merging them leaves the cost of goods short every time.

The table below lists every place money leaves on one Pulse 50 round. Amounts differ by brand; the items, the payer and the timing do not.

The inclusion column marks the edge of the agency fee, and the payer column is the one quotes most often leave blank.

Everything marked agency fee already sits inside the contracted amount. The rest leaves the brand accounts separately, and freight, duty and VAT arrive late, at customs entry and at invoicing.

Freight and duty is the item that moved in 2025. Executive Order 14324 ended duty-free treatment for shipments under 800 dollars from all countries as of 29 August 2025, and the customs fact sheet states that non-postal shipments are subject to duties, taxes and fees.

That is why sample economics need rebuilding rather than waiting out: on 24 June 2026 a Federal Register notice removed the end date altogether, across every non-postal mode.

No duty or clearance figure appears here because it moves with the item, the origin and the date. Ask a customs broker or forwarder for an expected rate at quoting time, put it against the freight and duty item, and the total stops changing after the fact.

Published tempo guidance puts both products at six to eight weeks in the usual case.

That figure is not the length of one stage but the overlap of separate clocks: recruiting, dispatch and receipt, production, staggered posting, completion checks and replacement outreach.

Using the platform sample programme adds a policy clock inside that. A creator has fourteen days from receipt to post, may take one seven-day extension, and may raise one dispute if the product arrives faulty.

Refundable samples run on a different clock. The creator buys the product and is refunded automatically, shipping and tax included, once the seller sales target is met, with a 120-day posting window and a 30-day return period. No approval step, but a longer wait.

Mixing free and refundable samples in one round splits the posting deadline between fourteen days and 120. No single completion date holds, which also makes replacement outreach hard to schedule.

Domestic delivery belongs in the same total. Transit time depends on which fulfillment route you use, so record the route alongside the estimate.

Decide the shape of the answer before asking about timing: which week does what have to be finished plans better than how many weeks does it take.

Two products inside one service line, with different inclusions. Pulse Seeding is built on product supply, carries no separate posting fee, and leaves production to the creator. Impact Seeding includes the posting fee, applies a client-supplied content guide, and runs one pre-post review with one revision round.

The scale differs too. Pulse commits between 50 and 1,000 public posts, while Impact is configured in sets of four, six or eight brand-guided pieces from nano through mid tier.

Deciding whether you need a review makes the product choice fast. With nobody who has to approve the piece before it posts, Pulse fits; with a sentence the brand must not lose, Impact fits.

The unpaid lane carries one more platform setting. Before a creator can request a free sample, the seller has to list the product in an open collaboration on the affiliate marketplace and switch free samples on. With that switch off, the request never opens.

Check eligibility in advance too. The body of the official guidance requires TikTok Shop sales in the last 120 days, while the FAQ in the same document adds a 5,000-follower threshold. Read only one and you will shortlist creators who cannot apply.

Decide who dispatches before anything ships. A tempo project carries one of two values, brand ships or agency ships, and that choice decides who receives and holds creator addresses. That choice is where personal data ends up, so settle it before the contract.

The two products can also be mixed inside one project. Review differs between them, so creator instructions become two sets and the operating load rises.

A share of posts fails to happen in every round. Build that into the dispatch volume and the schedule rather than treating it as an exception.

The platform records it against the creator fulfilment rate, shows that rate to the seller, lets the seller decline later requests, and removes the creator eligibility for sample promotions and coupons.

Knowing where replacement outreach sits makes the schedule readable. A creator moves through five stages — candidate, outreach, shipping, content, closed — and a missing post is caught at content and sent back to candidate.

Published tempo guidance lists backfill by replacement outreach among the Pulse Seeding features and states that the committed posting volume does not shrink even when the schedule stretches. That is a commitment on volume rather than on time, and it says plainly that the schedule can stretch.

The same sentence is absent from the Impact Seeding feature list. What fills an unposted unit is set by the product and the project terms, so read that clause in the contract itself.

Check how many rounds of replacement outreach the contract allows. With no number written down, up to the committed volume can end up meaning with no ceiling on the schedule.

Sometimes recruiting scale stalls instead. How many samples a creator can request at once is capped by monthly GMV band and badge tier, and a request that ended in rejection, expiry or cancellation cannot reopen for thirty days.

The practical lever against missing posts sits in selection. Shortlist creators with a recent record of actually posting, and habit moves before policy has to.

Replacement outreach also needs product left over. Ship exactly the committed volume and the first missing post stops the round.

The items below need an answer from the brand side before any quote arrives. Leave them blank and each agency will assume something different, which makes two quotes impossible to compare.

If the answer to any of them is that the agency should decide, that item is consultancy rather than a quote. Nothing is wrong with that, but the scope and the cost move, so separate it in advance.

The first item is where plans to ship from a Korean warehouse usually stop: the shipping service the platform provides assumes a US domestic warehouse, so a cross-border warehouse loses that option.

Check early whether the product can travel at all. Anything with liquid, aerosol or a battery needs its transport conditions confirmed separately, and confirming late pushes the whole dispatch week back.

For a sense of paid collaboration rates, industry research gives a distribution. One benchmark report of more than 600 respondents puts around 80 percent of creator-made content rates under 500 dollars, 55 to 80 percent of nano and micro rates likewise, and mid tier clustering in the 2,000 to 5,000 and 5,000 to 10,000 dollar bands.

Some values must never be copied into a quote. Posting and conversion rates are not published as fixed figures, and the seller-side sample review and dispatch deadlines were dropped because the source could not be read directly. The benchmark itself is intention-based and claims no causation, so it cannot serve as a negotiating baseline.

The last thing to settle before asking for a quote is what this round has to prove: posted volume, usable creative, or people worth working with again. Pick before it starts, or there is nothing to count at the end.