#550 - This TikTok Shop Lost 96% of Its Sales

How to get your first thousand dollars of sales on TikTok Shop? We're going to show you how to do this, plus give you a live case study where we are trying to get a real TikTok Shop account back to over a hundred thousand dollars of monthly sales. Hello everybody and welcome to the AM/PM Podcast. My name is Bradley Sutton and I'll be your host and this is the show where we discuss all things Amazon, TikTok Shop and Walmart private label and how to generate recurring revenue streams 24 hours a day during the AM and the PM. Hence the name of the show. Get it? AM/PM Podcast. And as a matter of fact, when you guys are watching this, I might be on my fifth trip to Korea this year, but this time for the first time I'm going to be visiting the DMZ at the North Korean border. And while I'm dodging bullets there, I'll still be making money online. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody and welcome to our workshop here today. Unless you've been hiding under the rock, you know how much of an opportunity TikTok Shop is. Sometimes you can just, you know, {quote} luck into success on there. In the past people have said, "Hey, you know, became a million dollar account on TikTok." But sometimes, too, if you aren't keeping your foot on the gas, you could lose momentum. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. We're going to be analyzing a real uh TikTok Shop account that was doing a lot of money. We'll we'll show the numbers and everything of what it was doing and what it now has kind of like went down to. But the same tactics that we're going to be using to resurrect this brand on TikTok Shop. This is something that anybody can do, really, if you're just starting out on TikTok Shop or you have started but never really got any momentum. You'd be using these same strategies uh or similar strategies uh for, you know, how to ramp up. Five years ago nobody knew what TikTok Shop was. But now more and more Amazon sellers are seeing the need to diversify what platforms they're on. As we always do on the show, we bring in experts from out in the community who are just crushing it. So, let's go ahead and invite today's expert Chris on. Chris, how's it going? >> Very good. Yourself? >> Doing just delightful. Now, you've been on the podcast before, maybe about but definitely not about TikTok, you know. Um can you give us your background like in e-commerce first of all and and when you kind of got into the whole TikTok shop uh world? >> Yep. So, I've been selling on Amazon since 2016, still selling Amazon. We do eight figures a year with our personal brands. Um about 20 end of 2024 beginning of 2025, you know, it's been happening but it got way more extreme I feel like during that time period where there was a lot of margin compression happening in my particular category where it was kind of a race to the bottom, margin shrinking, more ad cost. Really it was almost getting to like a break-even proposition um on on Amazon. And I got into TikTok because I was like, how can I I kept hearing these rumblings about oh, it's amazing external traffic, etc. And I was thinking to myself, you know, everybody used to talk about Amazon loves external traffic. Um and I was wondering if there's a way that I could use that external traffic essentially to increase my organic rank without having to spend PPC. And I kind of dove in headfirst, started learning the ins and outs of TikTok. There's a lot of things There wasn't a lot out there and there still really isn't a ton out there I guess as way of like, you know, there's YouTube videos for case studies and everything for Amazon. There wasn't much for TikTok, so I kind of had to learn myself and end up becoming very beneficial. Um through that time period from 2025 all the way through to through now, I've been able to utilize TikTok as an external traffic source that has essentially taken what would be my tacos for Amazon at 20% for my product that I was just talking about, we're down to sub 4%. So, not only did we create a whole new revenue stream on TikTok Shop itself for the brand I'm talking about, um I've been able to gain 16 points of margin on Amazon without really doing anything except for adding that new layer of uh TikTok. So, the halo effect people talk about is real. >> Yep. >> We've done this across several products and um I think TikTok is kind of a ne- necessity at this point for you to be able to be positively, you know, gaining positive net profit on Amazon while continually building up your brand. >> J- just to get the people uh excited out there, um you know, you've worked with a lot of brands. What's one of the more exciting things you've been able to to do where it's like, "Hey, this person was wasn't on TikTok and now we ramped them up to this amount." Or this person was just starting and and we ramped them up to this. Just to show people the potential. Uh >> Yeah, so um one one of the case studies I talked to on our website, so I'll name the brand. It's Outlet. If you guys look it up, um I'm sure you've seen some videos. You've had over 300 million views for that particular product. They were not on Amazon and they were not on TikTok. We launched them in April last year simultaneously. Um on Amazon, they've done over five and a half million dollars in sales. On TikTok, we've done over three million dollars in sales. Um and Amazon was primarily fueled from the TikTok traffic. Like the the uh cost for that product, which if you look up Easy Outlet in general as an extender, it's the most expensive in the category, um but the ACOS for that pro- or sorry, TACOS for that product is sub 4%. So, we've been able to basically take a product from nothing on both platforms to over eight million dollars in less than 12 months. >> Awesome. Now guys, you know, we'll put those one of those disclaimers, results not normal or or you know, don't expect this. We're not trying to promise, "Hey, everybody out here can get uh you know, $8 million." But, this is just to show you the potential. You know, like like there are some platforms where no, you literally would never get to that uh amount. But, it just shows what's possible. All right, let's go ahead and uh hop into it. >> So, we're going to be talking about a brand. It's called Grooved Learning. Um it is a brand that was on TikTok. Uh Bradley came to me a little over a month ago related to this brand had gone from in its heyday, it was doing about 2.4 million a year. So, averaging about $200,000 a month on TikTok Shop. There was some something took place over the last, I'd say, 6 to 7 months where the brand had gone from that $200,000 a month in down to what's now about $8,000 per month. So, a 96% collapse in monthly sales. So, you know, we we were looking like, how you know, how does this happen? I you know, we've seen where there's sometimes brands seem to drop in sales, but not to a significant amount at this level. And so, we were given access to the account to go in, look, and do kind of a deep dive as what actually happened, what's created this drop in sales, and what we're going to do to try to revive it and get it back to that level. So, um just a little background on the product. It is a actually a really interesting, cool product. Go buy it if you guys have interest in this, especially during back to school. But, it's a product that essentially helps kids from 3 to 8 years old actually be able to write um in some grooves that are in the actual product itself. So, they can, you know, trace out the letters, learn how to actually hold the pen, and it has disappearing ink. So, it's a very cool product, and that's why it's done so well in sales because it's demonstrable. You know, people can resonate with wanting to have your kid learn how to be able to write better and have them concentrating on working on something. So, I was looking at it. I'm like, I don't understand. This is such a cool product. How has this seemed to, you know, have this big collapse? And what's what's really happened is the the engine, which is essentially all the creator videos and the creator communication, all that had stopped. So, I think it was back in January of this year it started to slow down and then it just continually slowed down. So, we stepped in, my agency, it's called Octane Labs, we stepped in um at the beginning of August and came up with a game plan to turn this brand around. Um and what we wanted to do with that, and I'll move forward on this next one, we'll just kind of talk about some of the numbers. So, this is just showing kind of like, you know, we took over basically, I would say, we got act full access to what we needed right at the beginning of August. This is just showing the decline that's still continually happening. Um the content performance is sliding, so like the video GMV's down, earnings per thousand views is down, and this is literally been, if I was to extrapolate this back to January, it has gone just down every single month. And so, here's the deep dive what we found. All the creators are gone. Nearly every creator that was producing during that $200,000 a month prior performance, they're either recruited away by competitors or just have moved on to another product. The conversion collapsed, so the traffic's not the the problem, it's the content it simply stopped converting. And And one of the things that seems to happen typically is, if, you know, the videos still live out there, right? From that we're doing very well, but when something's a year old, if somebody sees that it's, you know, it'll say, you know, from 6 months ago, things like that, people think it may not be as relevant or it may not actually still have the same deal that's running, etc. Um and the the other two is, you know, the ads are barely running, so there was two campaigns that were going. Um the particular grooved learning book that has the most sales that I was just talking about, that one wasn't actually it it showed itself being in a campaign, but that one actually was not having any videos running because it was set up on a manual um campaign in GMV Max, which basically only was running one video and the video tags a specific product, and that was actually tagging another product of theirs, which is a Bible verse mapping journal. So, when you from from the owner's perspective, I'm sure they look at it, they're like, "I'm running ads, it's not converting, what's going on?" But if you actually went under the hood, you'd realize there's only one video going, and it wasn't even for the product that was the original hero. So, that and then the last piece of that is it's flooded category. There's a lot of low-cost competitors that have entered the arena to undercut. So, if somebody saw the product and then they went back to try to look it up in the like the shop tab and typed in Groove Learning or Grooved Learning Books, there's 70 other products that are showing up now. So, that that means two things. One, we need way more content out there, and we want people buying through the video specifically, not using the shop tab to try to find the product cuz they're probably going to find somebody less expensive. But I think the biggest thing is we need to actually turn the engine back on the proper way and have the ads showcasing all the videos that we've had in the past, and all the ones we're working on here in the future. And then there's the 80/20 problem. The account lived and died by a handful of creators, which is also kind of we talked about the creators moving to other competitors who are probably more communicative, but 77% of the category leaders' revenues come from just two creators. One of those creators was ours, and they moved to a competitor. Or was Groove Learning's, I say ours, but So, it's a it's something that we basically immediately were like, "All right, we need to go get back the person that sold for us. They loved the product, they did extremely well for us, they're working with another competitor, what can we do to get them back?" And then, you know, this is a very demonstrable product. We don't need just two competitors being the top dogs, we can get a lot more a lot more creators pushing our product, and it's a very easily replicable video that just needs to be shown with kids, and people are going to resonate as it gets pushed out. So, the first thing, and just to showcase that, one of the competing Groove Workbooks, they scaled since the the decline has happened. The competitors have increased now up to over $300,000 a month when they were actually below us before all this content collapse that happened. So, this is the competitor just so if you look it up when you're looking up Groove Learning, you know, they're they're less expensive than the existing product. I think the biggest difference is we have video tutorials and different things that are separating us and that's one thing we'll communicate to creators as we'll talk about here going forward. And so, what still works? The product still does convert, okay? 1.66 million all time the original hero product currently dormant not dead. Bible Map uh verse mapping journals 1.1 million all time. That's the one that's got the one video going and that's the one that's essentially keeping revenue for the actual um account today. Otherwise, there would be no revenue whatsoever. If they didn't have that one video going, it would pretty much collapse. And then there's cursive in Spanish workbooks 330k all time. Those are ready to to scale as well. So, what I put on here is every ingredient that built the original $200 a month in revenue is still on the shelf. The gap is execution and we can control those variables by making sure we're doing it the right way. So, our recovery playbook was to is to re-engage the lost creators, the ones that we talked about that were the the high-end ones, but there was also some that had did 50,000, 60,000 easily that we can re-engage. We want to out-commission some of the copycats. We have that massive margin or massive price difference, right? So, even if we're at 20% versus their other 20%, they'd have to sell two units for our one just to be able to get the same commission. We just need to make sure we convey that properly to creators. Poach their proven creators to get them under our our brand. And then, we want to make sure we flood content. The biggest thing that really is going to make or break the brand's recovery is how much content is out there. So, you know, you can have 100 videos, you can have 200 videos, 300 videos. Those videos will last in like growth, meaning like organic growth for 1 to 2 weeks maybe. They will slow down. But what allows those to keep alive is the advertising. And so, you need to continue to fill the advertising engine with fuel, which is content. And so, if we have nobody posting for this brand and we're not actually advertising any of those videos that they're actually posting, we basically get some posts, we get a small spike, and then they they die. And so, it all needs to be put into the proper channel where we make sure we have continual creator content being made by actually going out and reaching out through automations, through DMs, targeted collaborations in TikTok to get people interested in working with us, people who have already done well in this particular niche. Let them know, "Hey, we're back. We're running contests. We're running all sorts of different promotions for you to make sure that you are going to get sales with our brand." We just have to communicate with them, which is partially getting outbound to them, getting them to come into a Discord community to be able to actually run sales, run contests, run all sorts of different things, and and keep quick communication with our team so they know we're fully engaged because we went back and looked through like DMs and things, and there was conversations that would have been that were started, and then those people would have then essentially stop responding to those creators. And what do they do? They move on to the next thing. It's like, whoever can respond the quickest is going to be the person that feel the most connected with. And so, it's it is a full-time job, which is why we have a team that sits in DMs and target collabs and everything in our Discord. Um but creators want to feel like they are heard, they're seen, and they're able to be worked with. And so, that's a huge gap. And so, we want to make sure we fill and plug all those holes. And so, when we when we talk about like what we're launching. So, I just said, you know, what we inherited. We've kind of go over all that. They had the single video rotation ads run manually by hand. And um only the Bible versing uh, verse mapping journals, what we did now is we actually started a campaign again for the hero product, which is pushing those workbooks. It's back to school, it's kind of perfect timing. What we have done, and this is kind of to talk to you guys in general just about, like, we like Bradley said in the beginning, you know, how would you start a cold start? How would you start a brand if you're starting from scratch or you've just started to kind of scratch the surface on TikTok Shop? The first thing you need to do is get UGC videos out ASAP. So, what we did is we went into the network of creators that we work with, and we hired 100 UGC creators, not a not 50 people doing two each, 100 UGC videos with 100 different creators that are currently in production or just starting to hit the market right now or hit TikTok itself right now. That baseline is so important. If you go and try to outreach to creators with no history or you haven't had sales that have in any like large number over the last 6 months or month or whatever it is, creators can see what content's been put out, is it a hot and growing item? Creators don't just say, "Oh, I love this sample." They go look and see like, "What is this account What have they been doing?" They can see there's 60,000 sales on one of these listings. But, if there hasn't been sales in the last 6 months, they're going to go find a competitor that's got the sales, right? So, the first thing you want to do is get videos out there to show that there is fresh content being made, there is activity happening on that account to get creators comfortable with wanting to work with you. The second thing is once we get creators that are interested in working with us, we want to keep them engaged. We just sent them a a sample. That sample is going to cost money to ship. That sample costs money to make. I don't want just one video, I want five, I want 10. And so, what we do with these creators, these initial 100 creators that we're working with that we talked about, as well as anybody else that's responding to our outbound messaging to work with us on a sample sample UGC type basis is we offer them a cash incentive creator contest through our Discord. We say you got to join our Discord. Join our creator contest and we basically say if you will create five videos that produce $50 in GMB we will give you a $50 bonus. So we basically break even at a minimum or we make some dollars on that. But all we want them to do is to take that sample and turn what just cost us $15 in cost of goods to sample it to them and turn that into five pieces to six pieces of content and increase our total content fuel that we can throw into the engine with TikTok's GMB max campaigns. >> Let's say that somebody is just starting. Obviously on this case it similar to somebody just starting, but you know, people know about oh I can just search for you know, creators and and look for people who are relevant. But like you said, a lot of them nowadays they might look at the history and hey this is a dead product. I don't want to waste time doing it. So what you're doing is like you have your own network. But you know, like Joe Blow out there who's just starting, I might not have a network that I can just say here here's 100 people who who trust me and and would be willing to do a video. So how would somebody else do that? Or is it only through like agencies like you that you know, and other companies that that somebody would be able to do this? >> So there are there are different platforms out there that have creator networks that you can actually pay for the videos. I don't know if I'm dropping names here if it's okay to put on >> That's fine. >> Okay. So Join Brands is one of the ones we use. You guys can take a look at it. They have different ways to be able to buy the videos from the creators. If you use one of these networks the positive is you will actually own the content royalty free and license for in perpetuity. So you can post on cross platform. But the reason we use these type of networks like that. We have our own internal network we use, but we also use if we need to subsidize to get to that number we'll use like a Join Brands. There's a ton of different ones out there. That's just one that I know the owner of so Um Um Make sure >> giving them all this coaching and and telling them how instead of just like saying here's the here's the pro I think that's a that's a mistake that a lot of TikTok shop sellers do like let me just mass blanket find these random affiliates and let me just send it to them and just let them you know assume that they're going to do everything right. Like so it says the first thing is to have a a brief and then like are you like keeping them honest like giving them a week and then having somebody like check, "Hey, did they make the first video and did they make the second video?" Or or like what what's that what's the follow-up uh after this? >> So, the way it works at least in the JoinBrands side or if you're doing it yourself, you you you know, contractually you say you need you know, 7 days after product received, we have the tracking cuz we sent it to them to prove they got the product. But in JoinBrands, it actually has like a full timeline. And that the creators know they have to follow that timeline. So, it'll show you the different statuses, you know, product purchased. >> So, they'll usually This is another thing I'll add in a second about how we go about getting those initial sales on a on a cold start. But um they will say it'll say product purchased, product delivered, content creation, then they submit the content to us and we can iterate back and forth. Um one thing I will say to everybody here is if you give a five-page creator brief, they're not going to read it or follow it. You've got to make it short, sweet. They are creators, so they know how to do it. They just need some of the unique selling points they may not know about the product given to them. If you have an example, give them the example. But if besides that, you got to let them do kind of their creative stuff. Now, if they send you back a video that is awful and you've put some stuff in your brief, you can go back and re- and iterate and say, "Hey, this does not match, you know, the voice of the product or what we said in the creator brief." And the cool thing about using one like JoinBrands is they hold the dollars in a and like a you know, their own little escrow in a sense. So, if for some reason we can't get the creator to do it the way we want, we would actually basically just say, "Hey, this isn't working out." We'd get the refund back from JoinBrands and go hire a new creator. That's like happened probably one time. People know what they're doing on there. Um but that's how you keep it going. So, when it actually gets posted, the the creator will they post it, they put the link in there, it automatically gives you the spark code for advertising. Um but I can actually see the engagement rate, how many views they had, likes, comments, shares, etc. Um and with that, the other piece that you get um is they they track to make sure that the posting stays up. Like So, it's just it takes a lot of the manual work of like checking and doing all that. The other thing that you can do in there is you can also put in some incentives to have them try to create additional videos or you can tip them for additional videos. So, you may get four videos out of somebody you may pay them 100 bucks for or something like that. And then on the second side of it, the other thing I was going to mention that I I was saying to Bradley is through Join Brands, one of the ways that you can actually work with creators. And this is something some people do. I'm not saying to do it one way or the other, but you can do it where you either send the product directly to the creator. The other way that they have it is you can actually reimburse the creator. So, they buy the product through TikTok Shop, which shows as a sale. And then you would take you would actually through Join Brands, they get reimbursed for that that purchase. So, you're actually generating, you know, social proof already. So, those people buy the product, which shows some sales, which is good for new creators separately that are going to be looking at your product and going, "Are they actually getting sales?" Well, yes, I have 100 sales to start, right? This is on cold starts. Obviously, there's a lot for this brand. So, they would get they would show the sales already as social proof. And then they're going to be posting those videos to their account. So, anybody that's uh UGC creator that we're trying to outreach to is going to go, "All right, they got some sales. I'm sure some reviews will come with that just in general. And there's a ton of videos now I can look at and I can actually use that as a way to model what I'm going to do on my video." So, that's that's how you would start with those 100 videos. And then on the last piece I just mentioned was that creator contest incentive. So, we use um some of the different automation bots that are out there. Each one of them has their own way of doing it, but you can actually do and run contests. So, as soon as it's received, we say, "Hey, we're running a contest. If you can post five videos within 14 days, here are the terms." You know, join our competition here. We'll have a it's got like a live leaderboard, etc. And everybody can do that so that they stay engaged and that allows you to also usually get them you can ask them as they sign up for their email, their phone number. So, you are now have the actual direct contact information for these creators. So, let's say a creator pops off and does really well, they're probably going to be getting inundated with messages in their TikTok. Well, I can just text them or I can just call them. So, one of the things I'm going to talk about as we go through this slide I only have a couple more slides here, but what we've done the first thing we did over the last 3 weeks is from my email which shows like CEO of our agency, etc. We took all there was eight top creators for Groove Learning. And we obviously tried to message them through TikTok, but again, everybody's starting to get inundated with with messages because more products are getting on shop. So, how can you set yourself apart? Well, we went and used public data. We have a way of actually grabbing their their emails, their phone numbers, etc. And I personally messaged them saying, "Hey, we've taken over on the outreach for Groove Learning. We loved what you did prior. We know that we've been missing um you know, communications with you over the last 3 to 4 months. Here's my personal email and my phone number. We want to communicate going forward with you and support you with ads and flash sales and all sorts of things. And six of those eight creators we now have back in our stable and are like, "Oh, we were wondering where you guys went and we're so glad we have your information." And I should have put one of the emails up. I'll do that on our next follow-up so you guys can see the responses, but it's they were so happy that somebody reached out. They were missing it and they're like, "I would love to start posting for you guys again." So, that is like one of the big things is trying to get people's contact info so when they do have some sort of the needle in the haystack of videos that really pops, you want to be able to communicate with them directly cuz I can tell you we've had creators for other brands that have done extremely well and we cannot get a hold of them except we know they just continue to post cuz that's their natural thing, but you can blow up their inboxes. They're not doing anything if you're doing it through TikTok. They're not usually responsive, whereas if I can get some way, like we use a proprietary software to do this, we'll go outside of TikTok. We'll actually communicate with them directly and get them working with us and into our Discord, which will help us communicate, etc. So, hopefully that's kind of Uh it's a lot of information, but I think that gives you a good understanding of like the way we would do some cold start, which is the 100 videos. After that video, you know, the videos start getting put out. After about 50 videos minimum, you need 50 at least, you can start running ads through GMB max campaigns. But once you have some videos, some views, and then you have those 100 sales, maybe if you did the reimbursement method, um I would start outreaching through some of the bots and actually do target collaborations and kind of go from there. So, this is this is kind of what I just mentioned, but content is the fuel of your TikTok business. No content equals a dead listing within two to three weeks. And so, like I was saying, you know, 20 videos to 50 vi- You need at least 50 videos to start on GMB max, which is the advertising piece of things. Um for those of you who are not on shop yet, you know, you might think, "Well, this is an extra layer of cost that I'm going to have." The big thing mis- like not misconception, but maybe people just don't understand is if you have a creator that you were paying, let's say, an organic commission or open commission of, let's say, 20% for easy math, if they agree to work with you and allow you to push ads for them, they also have to agree, if you set it up properly, to what's called shop ads commission. So, they'll have a reduced commission. So, if you're spending dollars to make their sales, you don't want to be paying them the full commission if you're having to assist them in that sale. So, instead of 20%, I usually go down to 5 or 7 and 1/2% on shop ads commission. So, that extra, you know, 12 and 1/2 to 15% that we're now saving on their commission, I can use in my profit loss statement to know that I'm going to push that towards GMB max. So, that's just one thing to keep in mind. You want to try to keep the Shop Ads commission set up so that some people just do open commission and let it roll. But, if you end up spending $5 to acquire a customer through using their video, if you don't have a reduced Shop Ad, you're paying you're double they're not double dipping, but they're getting full commission plus you're paying, so you're not going to likely be profitable. Um and then on the GMB max piece of like the pipeline. Um the videos they enter the testing mode in GMB max. So, GMB max is their own algorithmic automatic auto PPC that the TikTok runs. This is the only way that you can run ads through inline like in TikTok Shop where you're pushing videos out further. And so, they have you set your return on ad spend goal, which your return on ad spend goal, you know, ranges anywhere from two up to maybe six um return on ad spend. But, when you're setting that goal, it's very different than Amazon, it's very different than any other platform. You basically tell it what you need your return on ad spend to be for them to spend your dollars. So, they have what's called an ROI guarantee or ROAS guarantee, I believe it's called. Um and what that does is if you sell 20 units in a day um at a minimum is what's required on the on the of that skew that you're going to be advertising in general. Um if they're unable to meet the return on ad spend have. Let's say you had a five and they only hit a three, and they spent 500 bucks, they would give you a credit up to 90% of that difference in two ROAS um as a ad credit because they weren't able to achieve what they were set out to spend and achieve on the return on investment. So, the more content you put in gives you the better opportunity for them to meet that ROAS goal, but if you put, you know, 50 videos in and then you stop putting videos in, the videos that receive, you know, there's videos that enter testing, they receive increased delivery, uh performance eventually declines, and because they need to meet that return on um ad spend goal, they will they will basically stop delivering it. So, you may only get down to a couple videos, they're not going to be able to meet it, and then they're going to stop delivering ads, and your entire business content business will actually collapse. So, that's why you got to continue to feed it and um give the efficiency opportunity to TikTok to keep moving it to meet those return on ad spend goals. So, I talked about the where what we're doing, but we're going to stabilize, we're going to restart the engine with the 100 UGC videos we just started. Um we've already started outbound campaigns to people to try to get them back in. We've obviously talked about the six creators we just re-engaged. And then as those continue and we see if there's any different hooks that have may have come out over the last 6 months that it's been somewhat dormant from either the other competitors or whoever. Um we will have them continue to make more and more videos as we see those working, and then GMV Max will scale what works, but we will also be telling creators this is what's working. We would love you to make videos with this content. So, um that is essentially what our plan is over the next, I would say, 8 to 12 weeks. Um we're going to have another webinar, I think Bradley and I will come on and we'll show you where it went. We're hoping it's going to get back. I don't think it's maybe it didn't get to 200, but I expect it to get to 30 to 50,000 quickly, and it'll just slowly build on itself. Um but we'll be working through that ASAP. >> You mentioned before there was some advertising that was set up wrong, where it was only going to one video. So, what is the correct type of how to set up uh the GMV Max campaigns to make sure other people don't make that same mistake? >> Yep. So, cuz you'll you'll probably you'll see normally you'll see a video, you're like, this one's crushing it, why is it not delivering in GMB max, etc. Um so there's two different types of ways. So GMB max, almost everybody uses it as an auto campaign. So what that means is every video that's tagged a particular product, let's say we're talking about this grooved workbook. Let's say there's 500 videos that have been made for this particular product, right? The auto campaign will be testing each of these, you know, it'll throw out in different little um to different segments of people. It'll do some sort of flash sale offers, maybe that's funded by TikTok. It's going to test it and figure out which ones convert and are winners and it's going to start pushing that content out. If you choose to manually do it, it's only going to work with the videos you have that you put in there. Um but it's still going to try to meet your return on ad spend goal. So if you if it can't if it has one video to work with, you think it's the best one, they keep testing it and it's not actually converting at the level you think it should or they think it should or to meet your return on ad spend goal, then it is not going to deliver. Or you can override it by saying, my my return on ad spend goal is zero, it'll spend your money but it may not convert. So when you go into GMB max and you create something, it's on auto. The only way it goes to manual is if you switch it to manual. And then you choose the videos that you want it to push. So that's the case on every account. It's always going to be auto. You set your return on ad spend number and budget and then and then it'll run itself. Usually takes 3 days for it to start learning videos. So it'll start slow and then it'll ramp up. >> When you have the auto, are you able to now do that I mean it's not really negative match, but are you able to like block videos or stop videos on the auto? >> exclude videos. So if you're like, this video is either you know, it's trying to it's like pushing out a video like this doesn't represent our brand well or I actually think it's it's not doing as good as it thinks it is. Like you can look and see it's like this doesn't actually have that good of ROAS. You know, it's eating up my whole budget. >> Yeah. >> You can do exclusions for video. You have to grab the video ID. >> 10. I was just wondering if it if the auto campaigns uh can do that. Like in Helium 10, you can set a rule in our ads where it's like, "Hey, if it if it, you know, dips below one ROAS or something like that, hey, uh exclude it." But I wasn't sure if that only works on the manual campaigns or the also the auto. So >> you can you can do excluding. You just need to figure out the the video ID, which is in like the URL of the actual thing. You can put that in and it'll exclude it. The other thing is if you're like, "I love this video. It's not pushing it the way I want it to." You can actually go in and boost videos and give it like I'll give it $50 of boost a day and it will not count towards that return on ad spend goal. So if you're like, "This one I think's a winner. I just want it to do it." You can you can put in there and you can you can set it for 7 days. You can set it with no ending. So you can test and and so you don't forget about it and just start spending crazy dollars. Um you can do that, too. You can do boosting on there as well. >> Okay, cool. Uh real quick uh before you forget, um what is your company name? How can people find you on the interwebs out there? >> Yep. So the company's Octane Labs. Our website is viraloctane.com. And I'm the CEO of the company. >> All right. You kind of covered this, but I'll just go ahead and surface it again. Brian says, "Tips on how to recruit the right affiliates for the brand. I've done a lot of personalized outreach, but for cold start, how do you get them to work with you without prior sales velocity?" So I mean, let's say somebody who's like, "You know what? I I don't want to use like a joint brands or another, you know, company. I I just want to use what's available in in in TikTok Shop." And and Helium 10 obviously has our influencer finder tool where you can message them. Is there tips on the messaging that people could do to to like make somebody more willing to work with a a newer brand? I mean, obviously if their product is like super cool, like, "Hey, it's it's like maybe the the top K-beauty product in Korea." And and they're the first ones to launch in the USA. I'm sure, you know, people that that would be uh exciting. But outside of stuff like that, like any little tips? >> Yeah, I mean, it's it's interesting. They're going to read your your message, so try to make it compelling essentially. But the way I would reach out to people is through targeted collaborations, not DMs. DMs get like a point .001 open rate. A targeted collaboration is a actual offer for them to work at a higher commission than open commission. So, like I was talking about earlier, let's say it was 20% is anybody off the street can come add your product to their showcase. If they get a sale, they get 20%. If I'm going to somebody and I'm like, this dude's a proven creator or this girl's a proven creator and I want to work with them, you would do a open or sorry, targeted collaboration, so they'll get an actual invite into their inbox. They'll see the product. It'll tell them they're getting a increased commission, so let's say it's 25 or 30%. And this doesn't need to be this high, guys. I'm just using these numbers. Some people are at 10, 15, and they go to 20. Um and then you can also set it to free samples auto-approved, and it'll show in there um maybe a reminder for myself to show you guys this on the next time we all meet. Um but it that is a much higher uptake rate for somebody to work with you when they see they're going to get the sample. They don't have to wait for you to respond 3 days later. And then the message says, "Hey, I love your content that you've been putting out for such and such brand or this particular niche. I think you'd be a perfect fit for our product product. Here's why we're unique. We will put ad spend behind your product if we have some good, you know, views and and different things. You know, figure out the the terms and language to use on that. Um and we've given you a free sample and a 10% higher than open collaboration commission. You know, here's here's my my phone number or my email if you want to connect with us or give them a Discord link. Um and go from there. That would be the way I would do it. One quick thing on that, when you're talking about this initial outreach, you have to have some sales to be able to actually do real outreach. You only get a thousand total messages if you have no sales. That's the That's the cap that they give you on TikTok Shop if you're brand new. If you have over, let's just say even a hundred dollars in sales, it'll give you outreach up to 2,000 people per week, but they put a cap on your the followers those people can have because they don't want like the top creators to be flooded so much that they never get actual real, you know, like larger brands working with them. So, just just some thoughts on that. >> John says, "How do you structure commissions? Also, what happens if the creator is just taking a sample, not producing videos that you wanted?" >> So, I go in and actually look. So, I have a seller creator account and we also have like an agency way of looking at this, but we'll go in and look at the competitors open commission and then we'll match the open commission or maybe a like a couple percentage higher on that structure for open commission. But, if I'm going to poach them, their creators, like I will make a specific outreach that's like, "Okay, these 200 creators are are killing it for this brand and I will go offer them 10% over whatever their existing commission is." I just want them to start working with me. You don't have to stay at that commission for that long or maybe they're worth it because of the overflow to Amazon. Even if I break even on them, I'm going to be getting it. >> It's kind of like launch launch mentality on Amazon. You know, in the beginning you're you lose money on PPC and you and you have a big discount code you're and you're fine with that cuz you got to get that original momentum. So, like don't be trying to think profitability when you're just trying to get started. That's interesting point. I like that. >> And then on if they the creator's just taking samples and not producing videos. So, TikTok's done a pretty good job of trying to stop this with there's all sorts of metrics that show how much do they have in the last 30 days GMV, what's their fulfillment rate, meaning how much do they actually do they how many what percentage of samples do they get to actually producing content. And if that goes lower, people are not going to give them samples. So, they're going to make a video. It may not be the best video, but if you're doing it right and these people actually have revenue, they're going to make I would say you're about an 85% fulfillment rate. So, for every 10 samples, you're going to get eight and a half videos, right? Um and then the shop ads, like I said, between 5% and 7.5% for shop ads commission. >> Okay. Brian says, "For joint brands, what budget do you think is effective per video?" >> Um so, there's two different types of um videos that you can do. You can do where they it's just called the TikTok shop uh posts. Um I think those are $100, between $50 and $100 per video. They also have what's called a um social blast, which is the same thing, but you're getting creators for much less expensive. You can't iterate and be as hardcore on your briefs and all that, cuz they're making just quick videos. Um I would do 100 blast videos to start. I think that works out to like $35 a video, which is not crazy, and you own those videos um in perpetuity. That's what I would do. Um I think that makes the most sense for the initial 100. So, that's about 3,500 bucks. Um and the only other cost you'd have is if you're doing that reimbursement, they will charge you for the reimbursement for that product, and then it comes back through paid through TikTok shop. >> Now, are those videos they're sending it to you, and they're required to post it on their own creator uh channel? >> you're you're basically choosing people that have like GMV already. >> Yeah. >> Their job is to they send us the video for approval. Once I approve it, they have to post it to their shop. Or sorry, to their account. So, I'll own that video. There's like a whole, you know, you have they have the entire like um platform where I can go download all the videos, all the spark >> it to Amazon, uh you know, like if >> Amazon, Instagram, whatever. You own it outright, but those creators are posting it to their account. so you're getting the benefit of also all their followers. You know, if you see somebody who's got an average view count of 15,000 per video posted, that person's going to put out your product, you're probably going to get 10, 12,000 views of your product that you normally would have never gotten. Now, it'd be great if you had one that was like that plus um you know, they have $100,000 in 30 days prior GMV, but with doing it um you know, with the more expensive one that I said between 50 to 100 bucks, those those people earn obviously more dollars, so you're going to get better creators. But if you're just trying to get your initial um content out, we've we've done we've had brands get $100,000 in sales in the first 15 days off of the social blast. So, it just depends on what you're looking for in terms of creators. Sometimes we do a mix, we'll do some really high-end expensive videos that are going to cost me 100, 150 bucks, but that person that's doing it has $200,000 in sales in the last 30 days. Um and then we do some on the social blast. We just want a lot of content, if that makes sense. >> Remem- Remember guys, you know, I I know most of you are already Helium 10 members, you know, whether you have a diamond or platinum account, you have access to to Helium 10's full suite of TikTok Shop tools. Um you know, some of the things we've talked about you can do uh in it. For example, uh you know, Chris mentioned looking at uh the creators who are pushing uh GMV for your competitors. You know, it's almost like a Cerebro search, you know, throw in those competitors' brands and things into our Product Finder. Look at over the last 30 days who's been who's been doing a lot of uh GMV, and then you could do a target collab. Uh we talked about that. You can do a target collab uh with them and you also do that right in in Helium 10. We talked about GMV max ads. So guys, you with for no extra cost, you guys have full access to these uh these tools in in TikTok Shop, and we want to hear from you um after using it what what else you would like uh what else you would like to see. Uh with TikTok videos and ads, are you trying to convert sales at TikTok Shop or Amazon? Well, no matter what you're trying to do, it's going to happen on both. You know, obviously if you're selling on Tik Tok Shop, you want to make sure it's tied to the products. They just have the button right there that they can click. But, regardless, there's plenty of people out there who still don't necessarily trust Tik Tok Shop to buy, you know, a product through. And so, you're going to have a a huge, uh, you know, percentage of people who are like, "Okay, yeah, this product looked pretty cool thanks to this video. I'm not going to click this this this button to buy it on Tik Tok Shop, but let me just open up my Amazon app and and buy it." And then this is why some people are like, "Even if you're breaking even on Tik Tok Shop, there's still a net positive gain for you because now you're getting the this this, you know, uh, ads-free sale where somebody's going directly to your product on Amazon by searching for it. And, you know, where you didn't have to go through all that cost of acquisition." And so, guys, you know, no matter what you do on Tik Tok Shop, it is going to bleed over to, uh, Amazon. >> Yeah, one other one other piece of that real quickly. Um, we So, we usually some of the brands that we work with on Tik Tok, we do their Amazon as well. So, we actually at least get access so we can see their brand analytics search query performance. Most people are up like 6 to 700% on searches, branded searches in general for their products. >> All right, uh, Chris, thank you so much for joining us. Uh, like we mentioned, you'll be back in a few months, um, to show the the the results of this case study. Guys, what we're talking about today was not conceptual or some fake brand. This is a real brand. Anybody can just go search it right now. Uh, and and we're going to be transparent. You guys can see the sales, you know, Tik Tok Shop tells you exactly how many sales, you know, these products are having. So, you guys can can follow it over time. Look up Groove Learning. Look up Graceful by Design on Tik Tok Shop. All right, I'm excited to see in the next couple weeks the the movement from these samples. And guys, if you don't watch it on on Tik Tok Shop, just look out for the email and we'll invite you to our next webinar. We're going to show you the results. Thank you guys, uh, so much. and thank you, Chris, and we'll see you guys in the next episode. Bye-bye now. >> Thanks, guys.