TikTok Shop expired sale text: remove it and reburn captions with Sume

TikTok Shop's Content Policy says prices and discounts must be accurate, clear, current and not misleading, and that content cannot promote false, misleading, unavailable or expired ones. Its July Policy Pulse adds that time-sensitive wording belongs only while a promotion is active, and that content must be updated or removed when it ends. If sale text is burned into the pixels, updating means re-rendering, so keep a caption-free master.

What the pages require

Both the Content Policy (updated 09/25/2026) and the Policy Pulse are TikTok Shop pages for the US seller centre.

Reburn from a clean master

Burned-in captions cannot be edited in place, so cut a caption-free master first and burn captions onto that. Video captions accepts authored cues (text, start, end), which skip speech-to-text, so you can change one price line without touching the rest. A standalone caption job is $0.20 for videos up to 60 seconds.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-captions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: promo-oct-reburn-001" \
  -d '{"video_url":"https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/master-clean.mp4","style":"black-outline","cues":[{"text":"Now $24.99 through Oct 31","start":1,"end":4}]}'

Do not stack text on text

Always point at the clean master, never at last month's captioned output. Otherwise the old price sits under the new one. Name the end date in the cue only if the promotion really ends then, and record which cue file went with which render, so you can find every file when the next promotion closes.

For the on-screen price itself, the sibling post on rounding explains how to keep the figure equal to the listing.