Amazon Sellers Are Moving to TikTok Shop… But Should You? | Ian Page

Amazon Sellers Are Moving to TikTok Shop… But Should You? | Ian Page Speaker 2: Most Amazon sellers still think TikTok shop is just a trend. But there's a deeper connection forming and is already reshaping how products go viral and how they convert on Amazon. In this episode, Ian Page breaks down how TikTok is influencing Amazon search, what types of brands are thriving on TikTok Shop, and how you can decide if it's your time to expand. He also shares where sellers are wasting their time and how to build a strategy that actually pays off. This is the episode for any seller that's sitting on the fence And wondering if TikTok shop is your next big move. Our guest today is a serial entrepreneur with over 15 years of experience launching and scaling businesses. He's the founder and CEO of Bullseye Sellers, one of the fastest growing full-service Amazon and TikTok shop agencies in the US. He's also the founder of Sellico, a SaaS style platform that helps sellers overcome the cold start problem through compliant data-driven launch campaigns. So we'll be welcoming Ian Page in just a second. But before we do this, I want to thank our sponsors. We could not do this podcast without the help of our sponsors. And at first, I wanted to thank Sellerboard for being a constant sponsor of the podcast, AZRank, Sophie Society, the Titan Network, and Connect Cash. Thank you, everybody, for supporting the podcast. We really appreciate it. So if you have any questions, comments, throw them in the comment section and sit back, relax, have a cup of coffee, enjoy the show. Let's bring in Ian. I'm here. How are you? Speaker 1: Doing well. How are you? Speaker 2: Good. All right. Well, let's get into TikTok Shop. So this is something that it's like the influencer slash creator, you know, four years ago, you go through the first year, the second year, the third year, you're constantly telling people how they can improve their sales by using an influencer network. And then TikTok Shop rises and you're hearing the same thing. And it's probably the same group who still haven't used a creator or an influencer that are missing out on this. So I'm gonna be, like, I'm really curious about, I guess the first question would be, who is this for? And who is it not for? Speaker 1: It's a good question. And we do turn away a lot of eCommerce guys. Like, I say no as much as I say yes to a client. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: Because the last thing I want to do is get someone, you know, Signed up, we onboard them, and we just head right into a no-win situation for everyone involved. It's not worth the time and money and the heartache. So I would say the same with TikTok typically goes with direct-to-consumer, the influencer strategy you were just talking about, where if you're gonna be off Amazon and you're gonna be building sales off Amazon, you wanna build a brand. So my answer is, what is a brand? So my answer is kind of leading to a question. What is the definition of a brand? You know, you have a lot of guys who sell on Amazon, but they don't have a brand, right? Okay. They put their logo on a box from China, you know, the old Alibaba trick, throw their logo on there, and they're a commodity product with a logo. That's not a brand. Those products, yeah, maybe you can do something with TikTok Shop, but I wouldn't be someone that would want to help you because I don't think you'd make enough money to justify me doing it for you, okay? TikTok is a brand building I have a funnel solution. Here's another good way to put it. Would you promote that product on a billboard in Times Square? No. If you just slap the logo on something, you're not going to spend money on a billboard in Times Square. TikTok is the eCommerce Times Square billboard, and it's good for brand building. Second part of my answer. Consumable products, obviously, are more of a winner than a one-time purchase. So supplements are dominating. They're the three biggest categories on TikTok Shop right now. Health, which, you know, similar to health and household. Beauty, which is highly consumable. And then you have actually the third one, which not a lot of people know this, is clothing. Clothing is really popular on TikTok Shop. So the first two categories on TikTok Shop that are dominating in sales, and I'm talking 80-20 rule, those two categories are doing 80% of all TikTok's revenue, are both highly consumable. Speaker 2: 80%? Speaker 1: Yes. If you go look at Caladata and you go look at categories and you see the revenue on the top two, it is dramatically more. Think of any TikTok guys you know that are doing well on TikTok. What categories are they in? They're probably in one of those three categories. Supplements, skincare, makeup, any sort of consumable, and clothing. Those are the main ones. Below that, it's like a far cry. You're talking Barbecue spatulas and dog beds, those guys are making 10 cents on the dollar, what the guys at the top are making. So what does that tell you? Not all products are perfect for TikTok. Speaker 2: What are some of the absolute, and I'm talking about from the Amazon side, if I was sitting there and I'm selling on Amazon and I'm in a few different niches, what are the taboo niches? Like just one niche, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, I wouldn't try low margin electronic items. Those are taboo, you know, the phone charger, phone cases. I wouldn't personally do that because the amount of affiliates you need to get in order to get profitable, the sale doesn't justify the sampling. Another one is high ticket items. If someone comes to me trying to sell a $280 barbecue accessory, I don't have a good solution for that guy in order to sample that product. To enough affiliates to justify the top of funnel impressions that are going to get the bottom of funnel. Speaker 2: But if you had a whack of cash and you're willing to give away that big ticket item, would that work? Speaker 1: Yes, that would work. Ninja is a perfect example. They're the fastest growing TikTok shop right now in this year. Ninja. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: Yeah. Ninja's got a lot of cash. Speaker 2: Now, I remember going back to Amazon, if we want to kind of relate this, I had a client at one point that was doing Dead Sea Mud. They were putting almost six figures of product out each month for three months, but they became one of the number one sellers ongoing since they did that. But you could never do that without putting up some big bucks to support the brand, to get the brand awareness and to get the product out there, get the influencers going. It was just too much of a commodity. But yeah, if you got the cash, things work. Speaker 1: If you got the cash, my answer changes, but my typical person that I talk to isn't sitting on a quarter million dollars ready to spend in Q4. Just on marketing alone. Just on marketing off Amazon alone. My typical guy, and I would say your typical audience, is doing between 1 and 15 million on Amazon, okay? And they don't have that kind of cash to throw around to make TikTok work. So I'm talking to you, you person, you one to 15 million, you're my guy I'm talking to right now, or girl, you who I'm talking to. Because the outliers are the $150 million brands or the ninjas that are in every Walmart. And again, if you can afford enough top of funnel, it's gonna work. Because that's what TikTok is, it's top of funnel. And I wanna talk about that today on how TikTok's the first top of funnel to put a shopping cart in it. And that's what's exciting about it. It's the first top of funnel That has a clickable shopping cart. It's interruption marketing with a shopping cart. Speaker 2: So let's go down that path. How is that a game changer? People are listening right now and they really don't understand the way that this is working. Why are you excited about it? Speaker 1: Because, you know, traditional TV, traditional media, radio, billboards, things that have been staples for the last 60, 70 years in America, they never had the ability to have someone right at the end of that commercial hit the screen, buy the product. That's something that they've never had. YouTube ads are pretty good. They're kind of a closer version where there at least is a call to action at the end of that TV commercial. But TikTok takes that effective proven strategy of top of funnel advertising and provides a one-click checkout. At the end, imagine if television had that where you can just write on Hulu, I'm going to buy it, hit the remote and buy it. And TikTok is basically the first, in my opinion, mass scaled platform that mixes top of funnel with a bottom of funnel conversion all in one with one click. Speaker 2: Wow. First of all, if you're a listener out there and you're selling on Amazon, just think of Amazon. Why do people love Amazon? Because it's one click as well. But this, I like the pattern interruption. That's one of the biggest things. If you're going through Facebook, one of the things that sucks right now on Facebook is every time I'm scrolling through Facebook, I'm an old guy, I use Facebook, but I get these pattern interruptions. It's happening too many times. It drives me crazy. But with TikTok, how is that different? Speaker 1: It's different because TikTok content looks more organic than sponsored content on Meta. There is no difference between a video from an affiliate that is organically reaching than a video from an affiliate that has ad dollars behind it. There's no visible difference to the consumer. Speaker 2: And I guess you could probably add to the algorithm is a much better algorithm. So it's, it's just picking up these, these TikTok posts and they're, you know, just spewing it out more geared to, to you better than I guess Facebook would, from what I understand. Speaker 1: It's hard to say the comparable algorithm because obviously they're both heavily AI based at this point, and they're both learning every day. But I'll tell you something that's unique with TikTok ads, if you want to hear it, and now kind of give you a window into their algorithm. When you put an affiliate video into their ad platform, which is called GMV Max, it This video actually sends out that video without you paying any money for it for a very short amount of time. It basically samples that video to some people and it learns from that sample. Is this video getting six second or more engagement, 15 second or more engagement, et cetera? Is this video getting any? Comments, is it getting any likes? You're actually, it's all, you don't even know this is happening. So your video is getting kind of shadow banned in a way for that period of time where you don't realize it's actually being sent out. If that video does well, then TikTok will let you run ads on it. What other platform only lets you run ads on videos that do well? Amazon will let you run ads on keywords that don't do well endlessly. Speaker 2: Anything, anything at all. And then they'll contact you and tell you to spend even more on that, those keywords. Speaker 1: That's right. That's right. Speaker 2: No, it's interesting to see what they're doing and how they're feeding it up. And from what I understand, once it starts to, depending like you talked about that six second, 15 second, and you're getting a lot of good feedback, then once you start promoting it, it's starting to promote it even quicker and further. Much broader than it would normally go from what I understand. Speaker 1: And the reason being is that it tested it already and it knows the video has likes. It's not letting you promote crap videos to people who don't want to see it. There's an actual integrity there to the platform. They care about the consumer not getting videos that are not relevant to them. So they won't even, they'll suppress your ability to spend ad dollars on it. They're cutting their own financial throat, TikTok, to make sure the videos are good. That's interesting. Speaker 2: Want more unfiltered tips from top eCommerce experts? Well, hit subscribe and you'll never miss a Lunch With Norm episode. Yeah, very interesting. And I'm wondering, we had this on marketing misfits. So Kevin and I interviewed this lady who has just killed it on TikTok, like $20 million in beauty sales on TikTok, but she's doing, she doesn't do so much TikTok shop. She's going TikTok live and she's on every day and she's just, just moving a ton of product. So, compared the two, would you kind of do a complementary, you know, overlap of both or would you just stick to one, try that out? Because live, it seems like it's a lot more effort. Speaker 1: It's a lot more effort and it's a luxury that not a lot of brands have. That woman is ahead of her time and she's putting in the work. And she's awesome. Yeah, she's putting in the work, man. Let's be honest. If you're willing to put in the work and set up a cool little backdrop in your warehouse and get some lighting and get a good camera, even just have a tripod for your iPhone and be consistent every single day from 6 to 8 p.m. you're going live, that takes a different kind of founder, let's be honest. So most people that come to me that want to sell on TikTok, People would rather eat mud than do that on a daily basis. That idea makes them terrified of TikTok. Going live? I mean, come on. That's probably scary for most people. So what we do in those situations is we do affiliate deals to go live. We find affiliates who have good live metrics. And we actually do deals with them, whether it's a higher commission or it's a per hour retainer, or it's a weekly or monthly retainer for a certain amount of lives. But that's the kind of stuff we can arrange if the founder doesn't want to go on camera seven times a week. Because why is that to be consistent? They have to be long. And that's not something that most people are willing to do is be consistent and be long. Speaker 2: So at Bullseye, you offer both of these services. Speaker 1: Yeah. But again, it's all based on negotiation. The main thing that Bullseye does is we basically build a brand ambassador group for your brand. That's 90% of the work that we do. The rest, the last, the other 10% is all just keeping the lights on, making sure your shop score is good, making sure that if there's any negative feedback or reviews, they get, you know, easy shopkeeping stuff. And then running GMB max ads which take no work at all because it's all AI based. So the other 90% is getting amazing content produced for your brand, whether that's live or an affiliate, that's our job. Speaker 2: So one of the things that I found earlier on, not so much on TikTok Shop, but just trying to find an affiliate base so we could build out a brand ambassador group is that it takes a ton of work to go out, reach people. Like if we sent out 100 to 150 promos and we know how to do it, We get a certain small amount back, less than 10%, around 10%. But then from that group, we'd only get about 10% of really usable content. A lot of it was crap, never was produced. I was just in limbo. And what people really don't understand is that, oh, I only got two usable, like really good videos this month. But yeah, but that's building. And then, you know, if you send out 200 next month, you might have four or five or 10 really good videos. Now you're building your database of brand ambassadors. And the other thing, you know, Paul Baron. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. So Paul, He does a really great job when he was building out his brand ambassador program. I don't even know if he's doing that anymore, but he treated their brand ambassadors like kings and queens. He got them to deals. He put together certain loyalty programs. He got them together for events. There's all this. He treated them right. And so when he had a promotion for his product, they did everything that they possibly could to promote it. Now building, you just talked about building that brand ambassador program or that look for the brand. Do you do anything like that? Like how do you treat those people that are willing to go out there on a limb and trust the product's going to convert? Speaker 1: It's a good way to put it. I mean, look, it's no different than building a baseball team. You have only so much talent. You have a farm league that you can pull from if anyone proves their salt and then you graduate them to the big leagues. That's basically what we're doing for every new account. We're building a farm team from single A to triple A and then eventually one guy is gonna come out for that season and be a major league player. Building that team is the hardest part. And that's where most people, client-wise, brand-wise, get the most frustrated. So we're incredibly honest when we talk to clients before they sign on. We're brutally honest to the point where we probably push people away. And that's fine with me. That's fine with me. Because I don't want someone coming in that doesn't have the patience for that first six months of brand building and ambassador building. Because the only way to speed it up is to throw money at the problem. That's the only way to speed it up. Here's why. Let's say you're a $10 million supplement brand on Amazon. On TikTok, the affiliates probably don't know who you are. 10 million on Amazon doesn't mean that the average affiliate has your product in their cabinet. Would you assume that that's true, Norm? Speaker 2: Yeah, they're micro brands. Speaker 1: They're micro brands. It's 10 million. 10 million is nothing compared to the overall picture. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: So most of these brands that we get are in that $10 million range, which is a respectable number, but when they go to TikTok, they're nobodies. So on day one, we have to build an audience. Maybe we have a little bit of an audience from another supplement brand that we can borrow and kind of use. And that is the benefit of working with an agency. We do have an audience that we've been building. But again, you are nobody. So we have to, from scratch, convince people who get 100 to 200 DMs a day to work with a brand that they've never heard of, that has no sales history, and spend the time, make a video for that, post it. So yeah, your conversion rate, if you're lucky, is 5% to 10%, if you're lucky. And then out of those folks, it's 10%. You are, you are. And then out of that 5% to 10%, you're gonna get about 10% that's actually usable. This is the biggest challenge and I don't want to scare people away, but I want them to understand why they're scared so that they can get through that fear. The reason they're scared is because they're starting from scratch and no one wants to start from scratch all over again. There's nothing more painful than being a brand new brand on a marketplace. I know that. You've already been through it with Amazon. The last thing you want to do is do it again on TikTok. And pay a retainer to get through it. What we've found is that the brands that stick around for six months and let us build that audience scale. One for one, if they stick around, because we're not taking on brands that we don't think are gonna work. We're not taking on those Chinese Alibaba products that we don't think are gonna work. So we are taking on good bets. If they stick around for six months, they're gonna scale. They're gonna see 30,000 a month. They're gonna see 40,000. They're gonna see 60. They're gonna see 80. And then eventually they're gonna be like, thank God, there's hope. And I have many examples of this. So it's just a stick around kind of deal, Norm. Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. The problem, like you said, is convincing those people to stick around. And you can only do so much convincing and then you just got to cut the tie. Speaker 1: Yep. Speaker 2: And that's very similar. You know, I'm an old SEO guy. And going through all the updates, like from the 90s, I was, you know, heavy into SEO. I built pages, I got them onto page one, and I rented them out to people who wanted to be on page one. But this is the same thing like nowadays. Hey, you stick with me. I will I need more than you know, three to six months. That's kind of the play like that's what we need. And then the first month you go out there people like you might have a client that's complaining that they're not, you know, naturally spread across the country with every keyword possible. So what do you have to do? You cut the tie, you fire the client, you know, unfortunately, because pin in the ass clients aren't where it's at. We, we have a positive environment. I'm sure you're like that too. You want a positive, you know, company, your employees, your, your clients that you're working with, but, It's very hard to message because a lot of people have selective hearing and they only hear what they want to hear. And when they hear that it's going to take six months, well, they hear one month, you know, and all of a sudden they're nipping at your heels because you didn't perform, you know, after one month. Do you find that happens? If you want to go deeper on how to dominate Amazon PPC during Q4 and beyond, check out our episode here with George Moressa. He breaks down advanced ad strategies, common mistakes sellers are making during the holidays, and how AI is changing the ad game faster than most realize. Speaker 1: We find it happens. A minority of the time because we are very, very brutally honest and I try to look in their eyes that they're like, oh, I get it instead of the yeah, yeah, yeah, six months, shrug it kind of a thing. So it is less common for us, but we still get it. We still get it. I think almost once a month we hear from a client that just signed up two, three months, one month ago, who's making the, who's griping about the exact same things we told them will happen. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: We're like, we told you that you're, you're going to be at about this many affiliates by this month. And we told you why. And it's unfortunate that you're complaining. And at the end of the day, yes, I would like to fire this client because I don't see them being able to hold on for six months and see it through. And let's just cut ties now before we spend any more of your money. Cause that doesn't make us feel good either. Right? Speaker 2: Yep. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: No, a hundred percent agreed. Okay, we are at the bottom of the hour, and at the bottom of the hour, in case you're new to the podcast, we do something at the top of the hour, and that's the Wheel of Kelsey. We give away a prize every podcast. If you're interested in entering, it's hashtag WheelOfKelsey. Tag two people, you get a second entry, and you also have a chance if you get our newsletter, which you can get that at LWN.com. LWN, Lunch With Norm, LWN.news. Uh, you can also enter there. Today we've got a great prize. I talked to my buddy, Kevin King, and he's got something called the BDSC business billion dollars sellers club. And he is giving us a three month membership to the business, uh, BDSC. I got, he's got so many BD somethings. Uh, so anyway, If you're interested in that, it's an incredible club. It's not typically just for Amazon. They've got some incredible speakers that come in. I know Leo Scovio was just in there talking about a bunch of different things. Reto Java was just in there. There's a bunch of different people. Dan Kurtz just did up and this is stuff that they don't share. So like Dan, when he was in there, He showed a lot of people some really cool tricks with what's happening right now in the LLMs and it's the people in the club that know about it. Plus there's discounts on the events that come up, all sorts of things. Like he just gave away for free, anybody who was in the club, the last event, it was $500 free just given to you. So anyways, check it out. It's BDSC, Billion Dollar Sellers Club. He has a channel also on WhatsApp that you can communicate with everybody and a group in circle. So you can check it out. So it's three months free, just hashtag WheelOfKelsey. Take two people, you'll get a second entry. All right, so let's go to a sponsor. Did you know Amazon profit is more than revenue minus ads? Seller board calculates your true profitability, factoring in every fee, return, shipping cost, and even cost of goods using FIFO logic. That's first in, first out logic. Plus, they automate your PPC, forecast inventory and avoid stockouts, reclaim money with Amazon reimbursements, set FBM shipping by period, and track Walmart profits with the same dashboard. And you don't even have to have an Amazon account. You can try it for free for two months. Seller board, know your numbers, scale your business. So there's a few other things that I wanna talk about. So we hear about halo effects. What is a reasonable expectation? When you're on TikTok, what are the indirect sales that you could get on it with Amazon conversions? Speaker 1: So the answer is that it's a sliding scale. The more a product goes viral, the bigger the halo. And the reason being is that the more a video has engagement statistics, the more likely people are going to be aggressively searching, whether they're just going to buy it direct on TikTok Shop or whether they're going to buy it on Amazon. So what I mean by that is a video that shows 15,000 comments One hundred, you know, twelve hundred shares is going to do better with creating a fervor of I have to buy this product on any means necessary than a video that has 16 comments and six shares. People follow the herd. So what we find is when a video really pops, it goes to about 40 to 50 percent halo effect to Amazon. Speaker 2: Whoa, that much? Speaker 1: Yeah, it's huge. If the video doesn't and you're just running ads and you're just kind of scaling and every video is doing its thing, like one video is making six sales here, one video is making 12, it's insignificant. It's totally different. It's like maybe 10%. You might see a little extra branded search. So what you need is, in order to really get the halo effect, you need a video to pop off. And then it's unbelievable. You will sell out on Amazon in one day, two days. Speaker 2: Really? Speaker 1: We've had it happen many times. Speaker 2: Oh, I didn't realize it was that high. I thought you might say 10%, but that high, that's incredible. Now, that's not the average, right? Speaker 1: That's not the average. That's the halo effect of a viral video. A viral video has a different DNA into it, right? It's got this kind of FOMO DNA going on. It's viral. It's got comments. It's got shares. It looks like something is happening. There's buzz. And you're like, screw it. I'm buying it. But I don't want to buy it on TikTok. I'm going to go to Amazon. So the conversion rate of that video just skyrockets because of the momentum of the video itself. You know, self-fulfilling prophecy. Speaker 2: Now what about countries? So I'm in Canada and I've heard this from a lot of Canadians but also some people in Europe that it's impossible. They have a US LLC. I have a company that's in Canada but sells into the States and it's next to impossible for us to get a TikTok shop in the US. Is that still an issue? Speaker 1: No, it's quite easy. Speaker 2: Really? Speaker 1: Yeah. You just have to know the right person. I'm not necessarily only saying that I know how to do it. There's actually services now that people will become the authorized user. It's not hard. We have, God, I wish I had my numbers in front of me. I think we probably have about 11 accounts that are international accounts that we manage where we actually became their authorized user. Because once we dug into it and we really looked at it, the authorized user in the U.S. does not have to be a legal owner at all or even on the bank account. They just have to be someone in the U.S. that has a U.S. address and driver's license that can say, I'm representing this brand. And we started offering that to international clients and it's been really good. Yeah, we have, I think, about 11 international clients now. Speaker 2: So it's very similar to Amazon with their agency, right? We just represent a brand. So we don't own the brand. It's just we represent them when we're going out there. Speaker 1: Yeah, I just had to spend a few months really digging in and seeing if there was any tax liabilities and that kind of stuff, because the last thing I want to do is get a bunch of, you know, big fat 1098k1s or something or whatever those things could be. So once we kind of cleared that out and we knew there was no tax liability, there's no legal liability, we're able to remove ourselves whenever we want. If the client relationship doesn't go forever, we're able to remove ourselves. So we built it into our contract. We're once we part ways, we give the client a certain amount of time. I think it's like 60 days to find someone else if they're not paying us as their agency. And if they don't, we will remove ourselves just because there's no point of us doing it if we're not managing the client. We also have an annual fee option. So they can just pay us every year to renew it, be there, be handy, always be the OTP, always be that person available if you need, if you're not retaining us. But the yearly fee is high. I think we charge like 5,000 a year just because we don't really want to do that. We want to manage the brand. That's what we want to do. And in that case, we don't charge anything. Speaker 2: Okay. That's great news because I was expecting you to say now it's still hell to get on to TikTok Shop. So that's good. Anybody who is in Canada, over in Europe, you just heard it. Contact Bullseye. If I take a look at TikTok Shop and I take a look at Amazon, we had a guest on the other day that surprised me. I didn't think that the fees from Amazon were quite this high. I heard that they were running around 51 to 55%. They said 60% now, which blew me away. And I'm usually pretty much on top of, you know, on top of Amazon, on the fees anyways. But when you take a look at selling on TikTok and on TikTok shop, and then selling on Amazon, if those fees are correct, you're You're giving Amazon a hell of a lot of your profit. Are you treating TikTok Shop any different? Are you lowering the price? Are you increasing the price? Anything different in each of these ecosystems? Speaker 1: There's a lot. They almost are not even in the same ecosystem, TikTok and Amazon, just with how they work. So the fees on TikTok are about 5% to 8%. The fees on Amazon are $15,000 just to compare. Speaker 2: Just to start. Speaker 1: Just the referral commission regardless of your pick and pack and all that. TikTok now has FPT fulfilled by TikTok. FBT does have some storage fees. It's competitive. It's better than Amazon. FBT, here, you tell me what you think of this number. For a product that's under four ounces, TikTok will store it, pack it, ship it. For $4.35. If it's four to eight ounces, they'll do it for only 30 cents more. You're looking at about 4.70. So I don't know if, you know, if you're one of those beautiful mind brains that has numbers always in your head ready to pop out, but that to me sounds like a pretty darn good competitive number for fulfillment. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very, very competitive. Yep. Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay, good. So you have that number. And then what's great about the affiliate network What I want you to know is that the affiliates don't get commission if you get the sale on Amazon. So you are getting a very inexpensive Amazon sale when you go viral on TikTok because most of the time they're going to search branded. Most of the time, they're not going to just search, you know, dog leash. They're going to search the dog leash that they saw on the video and they're going to, and hopefully the video mentions the brand name. So that search is going to go to probably an inexpensive or organic position. So that's the cheapest Amazon sale you're gonna get, okay? If there is a commission to the affiliate, if the sale happens on TikTok Shop, here's one thing that's really cool about TikTok, is you have two separate commission structures. If it's a viral video and you're not putting any ad dollars behind it, you can give a better affiliate commission, because it's running on its own, 15, 18, even as high as 20%. But the moment you have to put ad dollars behind that video, you can negotiate with the affiliate 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, whatever percent. So that's what I like about it is the fact that there's a lot more levers to work on your margins. The pick and pack is low. The shipping is really good. The affiliate is a negotiation conversation. It's not PPC where there is no negotiation. There is negotiation here. That's what I like about it. And the bigger your brand gets on TikTok, the better your negotiation is. And it gets cheaper and cheaper to scale on TikTok as you get bigger and bigger. You no longer have to offer 22%. Now you're down to 16% because you're a bigger brand. So I love the fact that you can really move that lever as you need to between the affiliate PPC side and the affiliate organic side. Speaker 2: Okay, well, let's talk about brands that are really doing well. You're on Amazon, you're an established, there's no brands for the most part, it's an established micro brand. And when do you know when it's time to expand over to TikTok Shop? Speaker 1: If you have the right brand profile that I mentioned, you're very brand heavy, you have a cool story, you've checked off all the boxes where you feel like you can really get customers to be loyal to your brand. And you have a consumable product. You're a really good fit. The timing is very important. And what the timing is, is the timing is when you have the financial comfortability to be able to leave us alone as your agency or the guy that you hire and not stop us before we get going. And that is a financial position. We find that most of the clients who give us the full six months to see it through have more money in the bank. Does that make sense? I mean, come on, it's not a surprise, right, Norm? They have more money in the bank. The bigger the clients we have, the easier they are to work with. Okay, so the number that I like to tell clients is if you're not making at least seven figures on Amazon, don't try to hire someone to do TikTok. Okay, you don't have enough money in the bank to see it through and you're gonna put them in a situation that they can't succeed. You're gonna handcuff them financially. Five million is really where I wanna be. Five million and above because that person can spend a hundred grand between the agency fees and sampling in a six month period to get on TikTok and put your flag on that TikTok mountain. Which I think a hundred grand is a really solid, good investment to see it through. So that's my answer. Do you have a hundred grand to blow? And if you do, we'll probably succeed. If you don't, don't walk into the casino in the first place. Speaker 2: Yeah, it'd be something you just have to hold off on. I've seen this so many times. Now I'm talking Facebook or Google ads, where I'm talking to a client and they don't want to spend more than a couple of grand a month. And I'm sitting there, and this has happened a few times. Matter of fact, it happened last month where somebody said, oh, I went to some guy, maybe I'm Fiverr, maybe wherever, and they said they could do this for two to three grand a month. And I'm sitting there going, okay, I would run. I wouldn't like just run. All you're gonna be doing at that point is giving the person your two to three grand, because you're gonna get nothing. There's not gonna be enough impressions. You're just gonna get nothing. And they end up going, I've had that happen and they got nothing. But it's so important. You gotta have the money. You gotta have the money. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: So, you know, if you're listening and you're not at that point, well, maybe next year, maybe in six months, who knows? Kels, I noticed that Tony, hey, welcome back, Tony. Got a question here. You wanna listen to what that is? Speaker 1: Yeah, so this is about the TikTok deal and everything that's happening with that. Are you worried now that TikTok is sold and the pending changes, how is it gonna affect TikTok Shop? I actually had a bigger worry, so I'm actually relieved because my bigger worry was that Amazon was going to buy them and somehow the FTC would allow it, which I don't know why they would because that's like violates every monopoly law in the world. That was my worry. Amazon buys this thing, it's going to ruin it. And I think you agreed, Norm. Speaker 2: Oh, a hundred percent. Speaker 1: Totally ruined it. So I'm so ecstatic that Amazon isn't the buyer that I'm kind of like anything else I can deal with. That's where my head's at on it. Speaker 2: Do you remember last June when there was the guy in China who created the avatar for himself? You went on for six hours. You sold $72 million worth of product. Is there a chance that this is happening over on TikTok where you can create the avatar of yourself, go live? And I'm not talking about today, but there's two questions. Can you see that happening? And then where is AI fitting into all of this? Speaker 1: Yeah, so AI still hasn't done a good job of making human realistic content at scale. I know a lot of guys doing AI and they're doing a good job. Brian Kelsey, mutual friend, he's doing a good job with this. But at the end of the day, you still know it's AI. And it's not at that point where it's gotten that point where you just can't tell the difference. You fail on the Pepsi test every time. So I'm not a user yet because at the end of the day, our success is tied to human beings in the affiliate network that are loyal to the brand. And I don't know if AI will ever fully replace that. So if you're gonna dive into AI, do it on the branded page and don't bank on it. That's the key. Don't bank on it. Don't pay some high retainer for an AI service, eight grand, seven grand, 10 grand a month and you have no money left for affiliates. Just do it on the side and be willing to throw that money away and if you're at that point where you can afford it, it is a cool thing to do because you're gonna get impressions. Speaker 2: I was watching a talk show the other day and it was kind of like real-life Westworld. They were talking about a new actress who had come onto the marketplace with an agent and they were seeking movie parts, but she was all AI. And I started thinking, holy crap. Will that happen with, you know, every brand has a personality, every creator has their own personality, but now you shift those and you create these silos of AI avatars. I'm talking about six months, maybe not six months, a year, two years, but all of a sudden, you're not going to humans. You're going to these avatars to go and create your content. And they'll be getting the commission and they'll be housed under one roof. Like this is just me thinking ahead, but I saw that and I went, how can an agent represent this actress who is AI? Speaker 1: Yeah, so the way you represent it is you own the creation of that personality. In this case, you would own the TikTok account. That's how you own it. So it would basically be an agency who has a farm of these TikTok accounts that are basically getting approved as affiliates selling product. That's already happening. It's already happening. Yes, there are already TikTok affiliates that are AI. We can usually tell. That's what I'm trying to say. You know, the sniff test is still, you can usually tell. So when the quality gets to the point where you can't tell, game over. Game over. Like I could be literally talking to AI Norm right now on a podcast and I wouldn't know. That's what I'm talking about. Speaker 2: Yeah. Take a look at sales calls. You can do inbound, outbound sales calls right now and you're talking to AI and you don't know. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Like there's no more, I did an interview on Lunch With Norm with AI, but you could tell because there was a slight hesitation. If I do it now, there's no hesitation and the questions are better. It just knows me that much better. And it's crazy how they've really mastered that inbound, outbound sales call approach. And even now, when you go to some websites, I was on one the other day and I could talk to an agent. I literally just talk to them. Here's the mic. Let's start talking. It was crazy. So it is evolving so quickly that I had no clue back when the first time I saw ChatGPT, somebody came over to me at a Christmas party and said, hey, have you heard about this thing, ChatGPT? You won't believe it. Unknown Speaker: It writes poetry. Speaker 2: We've expanded a little bit since, you know. Speaker 1: Yeah, I remember the day too. I think I had a similar story at a party where someone's like, have you tried this? It helps me with gambling. I'm like, what? What does it do? He's like, it shows me my odds and all these cool things. Speaker 2: Whoa. Speaker 1: So yeah, it was a pocket tool for a long time and now it's turning into a business tool. You know, before we end our episode, I want to give some bold predictions. You're giving predictions on AI. I want to give some predictions on TikTok, okay, as a whole. Speaker 2: That was actually going to be my next question. Good. Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm already ahead of you, buddy. So basically, I want to be on the record kind of, you know, like Gary V is so good at his predictions. I want to be on the record predicting that TikTok is going to overtake Amazon in five years. And I think everyone thinks I'm crazy because one year's It is not a long time and five years doesn't seem like a long time, but here's why I think it's going to happen. The moment TikTok gets its fulfillment in all four corners of the U.S. where they can achieve minimally two-day shipping and they can figure out their own marketplace SEO platform, which is not really good right now. So to the point where someone who's in TikTok can do search-based marketplace shopping on TikTok, TikTok will at that point pull a lot of people off Amazon. And the reason being is the only thing Amazon has that TikTok doesn't are those two things. That's all they have. They have fulfillment and they have a good search platform. That's it. Not a big deal. At the end of the day, with how technology is fast approaching every single day, it feels like one month of technology is, you know, a year worth of growth. I realized that and I went, oh my God, that's all TikTok has to do. Fulfillment and search. And they'll win. Because on the reverse end, how hard is it for Amazon to turn into a social network? Speaker 2: They tried. Speaker 1: Much harder. They tried and they failed. So which one's easier? Fulfillment and search or building a social network? That's why I think if you're not on TikTok, your brand, whether you can afford to retain an agency or not, get going, just launch your shop, start working with affiliates. I don't mean to scare you that you need $100,000 to be on TikTok, but it's okay to start now. It's okay to start working on it. It's okay to dip your toe. What I meant by $100,000 is if you really want to go for it and take it seriously, yeah, it's probably $100,000. But I think everybody should be on TikTok. They should start their content now, start building their affiliates now, because if my prediction is true, you're going to really have some FOMO if you didn't do it. Speaker 2: Very good. You know, there is one other thing to consider. And I love what you said about the five-year prediction because I remember Walmart and Walmart was everything. And I remember having a cigar with my dad in the backyard in Maine. And we were talking about Walmart and how nobody's going to touch Walmart. It's just way too big. Our brains couldn't think that anybody could change Walmart or kick them out. And then all of a sudden out of nowhere came Amazon. Now we've got TikTok, you know, slowly climbing, right? Not slowly, but it's climbing. Here's another one. Sora just came out 2.0 with their social network. And then you've got all these other LLMs that are out there. I wonder what's going to happen there. So my point is that you can't just be stuck on, oh, I'm an Amazon seller or I'm on TikTok shop. You've always got to be learning and expanding and, and seeing what's out there. Cause you never know who's going to sneak up and bite you. And it's going to be too late. You'll be, you'll be left eating somebody else's dust. Speaker 1: That's right. A lot of people are seeing that now where they used to be the number one supplement. They used to be the number one eyebrow, lash, whatever product they used to be. And they always talk about how things were back in COVID. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: And I'm like at the point where I'm like, okay, get over it. The guys that are beating you one for one have high branded search and are doing influencer marketing through either TikTok or Instagram. So either get over it and start doing what they're doing or back up and go now because you're going to keep losing. So, you know, I'm a little bit non-sympathetic when I hear that because I'm always like, well, you didn't evolve. That's what happens when you don't evolve. Speaker 2: Exactly. Hey, you know what? All those carriage companies back in the day when they didn't evolve with the, what was it called? The automated horse or whatever, those cars, well, guess where they ended up? Chrysler were one of the only few that did and they succeeded. So you gotta constantly change. All right, so I think that's about it. We're gonna go over to the Wheel of Kelsey, but before we do that, Ian, how do people get ahold of you? Speaker 1: BullseyeSellers.com. Book a call. I'll be on the call. I join about 80% of our new calls that come in and I'm happy to talk to you. If you're a new shop, you can't afford us, I don't care. I'm happy to get to know you and have a conversation and give you some advice on TikTok. Speaker 2: And if you're one of those brands that we've been talking about that can afford a couple of dollars, you're going to be reading about this in the newsletter that's coming out, but we've got, not we, Ian's provided a really cool deal for anybody who's interested in having that conversation. It's about a 200, not 200,000 value. It's, $2,000 value. If you wanted to give away 200,000, that's fine too. Speaker 1: And it's not even a value. We're literally shaving off $2,000. If you come from Lunch With Norm, we're going to shave off $2,000 off your first month of retainer. And our retainers aren't expensive. That's a big portion of it, okay? So that's a good deal. But just again, book a call with us. See if you qualify for TikTok and you know, I will be honest with you if I don't think you're a fit. So you don't have to worry about being sold. Speaker 2: You'll see all the information in the newsletter. Speaker 1: Thanks for having me guys. Speaker 2: See you later. Are you an Amazon seller that checked out your listing and said, it should be doing better. What am I doing wrong? There's got to be a better way. Well, guess what? There probably is. You just haven't had someone tell you exactly what's working and what's not. Flat World Network is for frustrated Amazon sellers. We'll take a look at your listing, your rank, your PPC, your traffic, and guess what? We're going to tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly about your listing. And if you're interested, we'll even fix it for you. So if you're serious about scaling, go to flatworldnetwork.com and book your free audit today. All right. Speaker 1: So today's Wheel of Kelsey is for the giveaway of the Clear Ads audit from George Maressa from Clear Ads. So we're going to shuffle these up. Give us a spin. And if you're interested in the TikTok Shop or the BDSC giveaway that is happening next week. Speaker 2: All right, Lynn. Unknown Speaker: Lynn is the winner. So I think you can reach out to me, Kate, at lunchwithnorm.com. We'll connect you with clear ads. Speaker 1: Congratulations. Speaker 2: Okay. So like you said, if you're interested in the Billion Dollar Seller Club membership for three months, go to newsletter and you can enter there. All right. Well, thanks everybody for joining us today. Like I said, at the beginning of this show with our sponsors, we couldn't do it without them, but even more important, we couldn't do it without you. So thanks. And we will see you next Wednesday.