#550 – This TikTok Shop Lost 96% of Its Sales
Audio version above. Video version below
What happens when a TikTok Shop brand generating approximately $200,000 per month suddenly loses 96% of its sales? In this episode, Bradley Sutton welcomes Chris Lyell, CEO of Octane Labs, to examine the dramatic decline of Grooved Learning and reveal the strategy his team is using to rebuild it. After falling to around $8,000 in monthly revenue, the brand provides a powerful case study of how quickly momentum can disappear when a TikTok Shop content engine stops running.
Chris discovered that the product itself was not the problem. The brand’s leading creators had moved on or been recruited by competitors, communication with affiliates had slowed, older videos were no longer converting, and its advertising campaigns were configured incorrectly. Meanwhile, less expensive competitors continued publishing fresh content and capturing more of the market. To restart the engine, Chris and his team are producing 100 UGC videos with 100 different creators, re-engaging the brand’s former top performers, and creating contests that encourage affiliates to turn one product sample into multiple videos.
The conversation also breaks down how new brands can generate their first TikTok Shop sales without an established creator network. Chris explains how paid creator platforms can help sellers build an initial library of content, create social proof, and attract more experienced affiliates. He also shares how to write concise creator briefs, structure commissions, use targeted collaborations instead of crowded direct messages, and continually feed fresh content into GMV Max campaigns. Without that steady flow of new videos, even successful TikTok Shop listings can lose momentum within weeks.
TikTok’s impact can extend far beyond sales completed on the platform. Chris has seen branded Amazon searches increase by 600% to 700% after products gained attention on TikTok, helping sellers reduce PPC dependence and improve their overall margins. The lesson is clear: TikTok Shop success is not built on one viral video. It comes from creating a repeatable system that supports creators, produces content consistently, and turns attention into momentum across every sales channel. Build the engine, keep fueling it, and even a struggling brand can find its way back to growth.
In episode 550 of the AM/PM Podcast, Bradley and Chris discuss:
- 00:00 – Introduction
- 02:27 – How TikTok Reduced Amazon TACoS Below 4%
- 06:03 – The TikTok Shop Brand That Lost 96% Of Its Sales
- 08:34 – Why The Brand’s Creator And Advertising Engine Collapsed
- 12:40 – The Recovery Plan To Win Creators Back
- 15:55 – Producing 100 UGC Videos With 100 Creators
- 18:45 – Building Creator Momentum From A Cold Start
- 23:45 – Using Creator Purchases To Generate Social Proof
- 27:25 – Why Fresh Content Is Essential For GMV Max
- 32:42 – Automatic Versus Manual GMV Max Campaigns
- 36:39 – Targeted Collaborations Versus Direct Messages
- 38:55 – Structuring Commissions And Managing Product Samples
- 43:11 – How TikTok Shop Sales Create An Amazon Halo Effect
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
How to get your first $1,000 of sales on TikTok Shop. We’re gonna 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 $100,000 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.
Bradley Sutton:
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 gonna 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.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to our workshop here today. Unless you’ve been high under the rock, you know how much of an opportunity TikTok Shop is. Sometimes you can just, you know, quote-unquote luck into success on there. In the past, people have said, hey, 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 gonna be talking about today. We’re gonna be analyzing a real TikTok Shop account that was doing a lot of money. We’ll show the numbers and everything of what it was doing and what it now has kind of like went down to.
Bradley Sutton:
But these same tactics that we’re gonna 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, or similar strategies, for 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 this 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?
Chris:
Very good, yourself? Doing just delightful.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, you’ve been on the podcast before, maybe about, but definitely not about TikTok, you know. Can you give us your background, like in e-commerce, first of all, and when you kind of got into the whole TikTok Shop world?
Chris:
Yep, so I’ve been selling on Amazon since 2016, still sell on Amazon. We do eight figures a year with our personal brands. About 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 costs. Really, it was almost getting to like a break-even proposition 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, et cetera. And I was thinking to myself, you know, everybody used to talk about Amazon loves external traffic.
Chris:
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 head first, 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 a 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 ended up becoming very beneficial. Through that time period from 2025 all the way 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, I’ve been able to gain 16 points of margin on Amazon without really doing anything except for adding that new layer of TikTok. So the halo effect people talk about is real. We’ve done this across several products and I think TikTok is kind of a necessity at this point for you to be able to be positively, gaining positive net profit on Amazon while continually building up your brand.
Bradley Sutton:
Just to get the people excited out there, you know, you’ve worked with a lot of brands. What’s one of the more exciting things you’ve been able to do where it’s like, hey, this person wasn’t on TikTok and now we ramped them up to this amount or this person was just starting and we ramped them up to this just to show people the potential.
Chris:
Yeah, so one of the case studies it’s actually on our website, so I’ll name the brand. It’s called Easy Outlet. If you guys look it up, I’m sure you’ve seen some videos. We’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. On Amazon, they’ve done over $5.5 million in sales. On TikTok, we’ve done over $3 million in sales. And Amazon was primarily fueled from the TikTok traffic. Like the ACoS for that product, which if you look up Easy Outlet in general as an extender, it’s the most expensive in the category. But the ACoS for that product, 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 $8 million in less than 12 months.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Now guys, we’ll put one of those disclaimers, results not normal, or don’t expect this. We’re not trying to promise, hey, everybody out here can get $8 million, but this is just to show you the potential. Like there are some platforms where, no, you literally would never get to that amount, but just shows what’s possible. All right, let’s go ahead and hop into it.
Chris:
So we’re gonna be talking about a brand, it’s called Grooved Learning. It is a brand that was on TikTok. Bradley came to me a little over a month ago related to this brand had gone from, in its payday, it was doing about 2.4 million a year. So averaging about $200,000 a month on TikTok shop. There was something took place over the last, I’d say six to seven months where the brand had gone from that $200,000 a month down to what’s now about $8,000 per month. So a 96% collapse in monthly sales. So we were looking like, how does this happen? 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 into kind of a deep dive as what actually happened, what’s created this drop in sales, and what we’re gonna do to try to revive it and get it back to that level.
Chris:
So just a little background on the product. It is 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 three to eight years old actually be able to write in some grooves that are in the actual product itself. So they can 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. 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 does this seem to have this big collapse? And what’s really happened is 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.
Chris:
We stepped in at the beginning of August and came up with a game plan to turn this brand around. 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 the kind of like, we took over basically, I would say, we got full access to what we needed right at the beginning of August. This is just showing the decline that’s still continually happening. The content performance is sliding. So like the video GMVs down, earnings per thousand views is down. And this has 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 collapse. So traffic’s not the problem, it’s the content had simply stopped converting.
Chris:
And one of the things that seems to happen typically is, if 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’ll say from six 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, et cetera. And the other two is, the ads are barely running. So there was two campaigns that were going.The particular grooved learning book that has the most sales that I was just talking about, that one wasn’t actually, 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 campaign in GMB 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 from the owner’s perspective, I’m sure they looked 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 was only one video going and it wasn’t even for the product that was the original hero.
Chris:
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 shop tab and typed in grooved learning or grooved learning books, there’s 70 other products that are showing up now. So 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 because they’re probably gonna 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.
Chris:
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 grooved learnings. I say ours, but. So it’s something that we basically immediately were like, all right, we need to go get back the person that sold for us.They love the product. They did extremely well for us. They’re working with another competitor.
Chris:
What can we do to get them back? And then this is a very demonstrable product. We don’t need just two competitors being the top dogs. We can get 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 gonna 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 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 had happened. So this is the competitor. Just so if you look it up, when you’re looking up groove learning, you know, 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?
Chris:
The product still does convert, okay? 1.6 million all time, the original hero product, currently dormant, not dead. Bible map verse mapping journals, 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 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 and Spanish workbooks, 330K all time, those are ready 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.
Chris:
So our recovery playbook is to re-engage the lost creators, the ones that we talked about that were the high-end ones, but there was also some that did 50,000, 60,000 easily that we can re-engage. We wanna out commission some of the copycats. We have that massive margin or massive price difference, right? So even if we’re at 20% versus the other 20%, they’d have to sell two units for R1 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 brand. And then we wanna 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 can have 100 videos, you could have 200 videos, 300 videos, those videos will last in like growth, meaning like organic growth for one to two weeks, maybe they will slow down. But what allows those to keep alive is the advertising.
Chris:
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 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’ve 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 keep quick communication with our team so they know we’re fully engaged. Because we went back and looked through DMs and things and there was conversations that were started and then those people would 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 gonna be the person they feel the most connected with. And so 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.
Chris:
But creators wanna 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 wanna make sure we fill and plug all those holes. And so when we talk about what we’re launching, so I just said, what we inherited, we’ve kind of go over all that. They had the single video rotation, ads run manually by hand, and only the Bible verse mapping journals. What we did now is we actually started a campaign again for the Hero product, which is pushing those workbooks.nIt’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 Bradley said in the beginning, how would you start a cold start?
Chris:
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 50 people doing two each, 100 UGC videos with 100 different creators that are currently in production and 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 in any large number over the last six months or month or whatever it is, creators can see what content’s been put out. Is it a hot and growing item?
Chris:
Creators don’t just say, oh, I love this sample. They go look and see like, what is this, 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 six months, they’re gonna go find the competitor that’s got the sales, right? So the first thing you wanna 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 wanna keep them engaged. We just sent them 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 hundred 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 UGC type basis is we offer them a cash incentive creator contest through our Discord.
Chris:
We say, you gotta join our Discord, join our creator contest. And we basically say, if you will create five videos that produce $50 in GMV, 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 GMV Max campaigns.
Bradley Sutton:
Let’s say that somebody is just starting, obviously on this case, it’s similar to somebody just starting, but people know about, oh, I can just search for creators 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 wanna waste time doing it. So what you’re doing is like you have your own network, but like Joe Blow out there who’s just starting, I might not have a network that I can just say, hey, here’s a hundred people who trust me 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 and other companies that somebody would be able to do this?
Chris:
So 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 licensed 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 that’s the one we use.
Chris:
But the biggest piece of this is if you go out and do all this outreach to creators, most of the people who are gonna actually wanna work with you when you’re fresh, are gonna be people who don’t have any sales. And I’m not giving out product to people that don’t have any proven sales history, right? In Join Brands, you are paying them. So people who have actual GMV that sell, that know what they’re doing, have to follow my script and my brief to be able to get paid. I control the entire output, the timing. And since I’m giving them dollars, they’re gonna work with us versus just doing it on the sample side. They might put up a video and it does nothing because there’s no momentum for the brand.So this is one way to kickstart that engine. That’s how you can cold start is using something like that. And really, you can go as fast as you want on those. You can have 100 videos made in 30 days if you get them to samples quick enough. They upload the content.
Chris:
They have a timeline to follow. It’s not like they can take six months. Once they receive the product, they have seven days to upload content. You can iterate back and forth. That is the way that you can get those 100 UGC videos going.In there, you put a creator brief. You put examples of, if you have a competitor, you say, look, here’s a competitor who’s done $100,000 in sales on this particular video. This is what we want you to try to do, but with our brand. You know, there’s a couple of caveats and things I would also put in just your creator brief. You don’t want AI generated videos. You need them to show their face. We don’t want voiceovers. I need them to interact with the camera and the product. Make sure-
Bradley Sutton:
So you’re giving them all this coaching and telling them how instead of just like saying, here’s the product. I think that’s a mistake that a lot of TikTok shop sellers do is like, let me just mask, blanket, find these random affiliates and let me just send it to them and just let them, you know, assume that they’re gonna do everything right. So it says the first thing is to have 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 like, what’s the followup after this?
Chris:
So the way it works, at least in the joint brand side, or if you’re doing it yourself, you know, contractually, you say you need, you know, seven days after product received, we have the tracking because we sent it to them to prove they got the product. But in joint brands, it actually has like a full timeline and 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 cold start. But 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. One thing I will say to everybody here is if you give a five page creator brief, they’re not gonna read it or follow it. You gotta 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.
Chris:
If you have an example, give them the example. But if besides that, you gotta 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 reiterate and say, hey, this does not match the voice of the product or what we said in the creator brief. And the cool thing about using one like joint brands is they hold the dollars in 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 joint brands and go hire a new creator. That’s happened probably one time. People know what they’re doing on there. But that’s how you keep it going. So when it actually gets posted, the creator will, they post it, they put the link in there, it automatically gives you the spark code for advertising. But I can actually see the engagement rate, how many views they had, likes, comments, shares, et cetera. And with that, the other piece that you get is they track to make sure that the posting stays up.
Chris:
So it takes a lot of the manual work of 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 have paid a hundred bucks for or something like that. And then on the second side of it, the other thing I was gonna mention that I was saying to Bradley is through joint 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 joint brands, they get reimbursed for that purchase. So you’re actually generating social proof already.
Chris:
So those people buy the product, which shows some sales, which is good for new creators separately that are gonna be looking at your product and going, are they actually getting sales? Well, yes, I have a hundred 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 gonna be posting those videos to their account. So anybody that’s a UGC creator that we’re trying to outreach to is gonna 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 gonna do on my video. So that’s how you would start with those hundred videos. And then on the last piece I just mentioned was that creator contest incentive. So we use 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.
Chris:
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. Join our competition here. We’ll have a, it’s got like a live leaderboard, et cetera. 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 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 gonna be getting inundated with messages in their TikTok.
Chris:
Well, I can just text them or I can just call them. So one of the things I’m gonna 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 three weeks is from my email, which shows like CEO of our agency, et cetera. 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 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 emails, their phone numbers, et cetera. 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 communications with you over the last three to four months. Here’s my personal email and my phone number. We wanna 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.
Chris:
And I should have put one of the emails up. I’ll do that on our next follow-up so you guys can see their responses. But 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 wanna be able to communicate with them directly because I can tell you we’ve had creators for other brands that have done extremely well. We cannot get ahold of them, except we know they just continue to post because 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.
Chris:
We’ll actually communicate with them directly and get them working with us and into our Discord, which will help us communicate, et cetera. So hopefully that’s kind of 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, the videos start getting put out. After about 50 videos minimum, you need 50 at least, you can start running ads through GMV Max campaigns. But once you have some videos, some views, and then you have those 100 sales, maybe if you did the reimbursement method, I would start outreaching through some of the bots and actually do target collaborations and kind of go from there. So 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, 20 videos to 50 videos, you need at least 50 videos to start on GMV Max, which is the advertising piece of things. For those of you who are not on shop yet, you might think, well, this is an extra layer of costs that I’m gonna have.
Chris:
The big thing, like not misconception, but maybe people just don’t understand is if you have a creator that you are paying, let’s say an organic commission or open commission of let’s say 20% for EasyMath, 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 wanna 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 five or 7 1⁄2% on shop ads commission. So that extra 12 1⁄2 to 15% that we’re now saving on their commission, I can use in my profit and loss statement to know that I’m gonna push that towards GMB Max. So that’s just one thing to keep in mind. You wanna 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 ads, you’re paying double, they’re not double dipping, but they’re getting full commission plus you’re paying. So you’re not gonna likely be profitable.
Chris:
And then on the GMB Max piece of like the pipeline, the videos, they enter the testing mode in GMB Max. So GMB Max is their own algorithmic automatic auto PPC that 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, ranges anywhere from two up to maybe six 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. And what that does is if you sell 20 units in a day at a minimum is what’s required of that SKU that you’re gonna be advertising in general, if they’re unable to meet the return on ad spend goal you 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 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 from the meet that ROAS goal.
Chris:
But if you put 50 videos in and then you stop putting videos in, the videos that receive, there’s videos that enter testing, they receive increased delivery, performance eventually declines and because they need to meet that return on ad spend goal, they will basically stop delivering it.So you may only get down to a couple videos, they’re not gonna be able to meet it and then they’re gonna stop delivering ads and your entire business, content business will actually collapse. So that’s why you gotta continue to feed it and give the efficiency opportunity to TikTok to keep moving it to meet those return on ad spend goals. So I talked about what we’re doing but we’re gonna stabilize, we’re gonna restart the engine with the 100 UDC videos we just started. We’ve already started outbound campaigns to people to try to get them back in. We’ve obviously talked about those 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 six months that it’s been somewhat dormant from either the other competitors or whoever, 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 that is essentially what our plan is over the next, I would say eight to 12 weeks. We’re gonna have another webinar, I think Bradley and I will come on and we’ll show you where it went. We’re hoping it’s gonna get back, I don’t think it’s maybe gonna get to 200 but I expect it to get to 30 to 50,000 quickly and it’ll just slowly build on itself but we’ll be working through that ASAP.
Bradley Sutton:
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 the GMV Max campaigns to make sure other people don’t make that same mistake?
Chris:
Yep, so, cause 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 GMV Max, et cetera? So there’s two different types of ways. So GMV 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, it’ll throw out in different little, to different segments of people, it’ll do some sort of flash sale offers, maybe that’s funded by TikTok, it’s gonna test it and figure out which ones convert and are winners and it’s gonna start pushing that content out. If you choose to manually do it, it’s only gonna work with the videos you have that you put in there, but it’s still going to try to meet your return on ad spend goal. So if it can’t, if it has one video to work with, you think it’s the best one, and 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 return on ad spend goal is zero, it’ll spend your money, but it may not convert.
Chris:
So when you go into GMV 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 gonna be auto. You set your return on ad spend number and budget, and then it’ll run itself. Usually takes three days for it to start learning videos. So it’ll start slow and then it’ll ramp up.
Bradley Sutton:
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?
Chris:
Yeah, you can 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 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 heating up my whole budget. You can do exclusions for video, you have to grab the video ID.
Bradley Sutton:
I was just wondering if the auto campaigns can do that, like in Helium 10, you can set a rule in our ads where it’s like, hey, if it dips below one ROAS or something like that, hey, exclude it.But I wasn’t sure if that only works on the manual campaigns or also the auto.
Chris:
So yeah, you can do excluding, you just need to figure out 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 a boost a day, and it will not count towards that return on ad spend goal. So if you’re like, this one I think is a winner, I just wanted to do it, you could put in there and you could set it for seven days, you could set it with no ending. So you can test and so you don’t forget about it and just start spending crazy dollars. You can do that too, you can do boosting on there as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. Real quick, before you forget, what is your company name? How can people find you on the interwebs out there?
Chris:
Yep, so the company is Octane Labs, our website is viraloctane.com and I’m the CEO of the company.
Bradley Sutton:
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 have 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 don’t want to use like a joint brands or another company, I just want to use what’s available in TikTok shop 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 like make somebody more willing to work with a newer brand? I mean, obviously if their product is like super cool, like hey, it’s like maybe the top K-beauty product in Korea and they’re the first ones to launch in the USA, I’m sure that would be exciting, but outside of stuff like that, like any little tips?
Chris:
Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. They’re gonna read 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 0.001 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 wanna 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. And then you can also set it to free samples, auto approved, and it’ll show in there, maybe a reminder for myself to show you guys this on the next time we all meet. But that is a much higher uptake rate for somebody to work with you when they see you, they’re gonna get the sample, they don’t have to wait for you to respond three days later.
Chris:
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. Here’s why we’re unique. We will put ad spend behind your product if we have some good views and different things, figure out the terms and language to use on that. And we’ve given you a free sample and a 10% higher than open collaboration commission. Here’s my phone number or my email if you wanna connect with us or give them a Discord link 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 1,000 total messages if you have no sales. 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 $100 in sales, it’ll give you outreach up to 2,000 people per week, but they put a cap on the followers those people can have because they don’t want the top creators to be flooded so much that they never get actual real, like larger brands working with them. So just some thoughts on that.
Bradley Sutton:
John says, how do you structure commissions? Also, what happens if the creator is just taking a sample, not producing videos that you wanted?
Chris:
So I go in and actually look, so I have a separate creator account and we also have an agency way of looking at this, but we’ll go in and look at the competitor’s open commission and then we’ll match the open commission or maybe 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 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 gonna be getting it.
Bradley Sutton:
It’s kind of like launch mentality on Amazon. In the beginning, you lose money on PPC and you have a big discount code and you’re fine with that because 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 an interesting point, I like that.
Chris:
And then 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 they had in the last 30 days GMV, what’s their fulfillment rate, meaning how much do they actually, what percentage of samples do they get to actually producing content? And if that goes lower, people are not gonna give them samples. So they’re gonna make a video, it may not be the best video, but if you’re doing it right and these people actually have revenue, they are gonna make, I would say you’re about an 85% fulfillment rate. So for every 10 samples, you’re gonna get eight and a half videos, right? And then the shop ads, like I said, between five and seven and a half percent for shop ads commission.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Brian says for joint brands, what budget do you think is effective per video?
Chris:
So there’s two different types of videos that you can do. You can do where they, it’s just called the TikTok shop posts. I think those are a hundred dollars, between 50 and a hundred dollars per video. They also have what’s called a 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, cause they’re making just quick videos. I would do a hundred blast videos to start. I think that works out to like $35 a video, which is not crazy. And you own those videos in perpetuity. That’s what I would do. I think that makes the most sense for the initial hundred. So that’s what 3,500 bucks. 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.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, are those videos, they’re sending it to you and they’re required to post it on their own creator channel?
Chris:
Yeah, so you’re basically choosing people that have like GMV already. 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, they have the entire like platform where I can go download all the videos, all the spark codes, all that stuff.
Bradley Sutton:
And then you can upload it to Amazon.
Chris:
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. If you see somebody who’s got an average view count of 15,000 per video posted, that person’s gonna put out your product.You’re probably gonna 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 they have $100,000 in 30 days prior GMV. But with doing it, with the more expensive one that I said, between 50 to 100 bucks, those people earn obviously more dollars. So you’re gonna get better creators. But if you’re just trying to get your initial content out, 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 gonna cost me 100, 150 bucks, but that person that’s doing it has $200,000 in sales in the last 30 days. And then we do some on the social blast. We just want a lot of content, if that makes sense.
Bradley Sutton:
Remember, guys, I know most of you are already Helium 10 members. Whether you have a Diamond or Platinum account, you have access to Helium 10’s full suite of TikTok shop tools.Some of the things we’ve talked about you can do in it. For example, Chris mentioned looking at the creators who are pushing GMV for your competitors. It’s almost like a Cerebro search. Throw in those competitors, brands, and things into our product finder. Look at, over the last 30 days, who’s been doing a lot of GMV, and then you could do a Target collab. We talked about that. You can do a Target collab with them, and you can also do that right in Helium 10. We talked about GMV Max Ad. So guys, for no extra cost, you guys have full access to these tools in TikTok shop, and we wanna hear from you after using it what else you would like to see. With TikTok videos and ads, are you trying to convert sales to TikTok shop or Amazon?
Bradley Sutton:
Well, no matter what you’re trying to do, it’s gonna happen on both. Obviously, if you’re selling on TikTok shop, you wanna make sure it’s tied to the product. 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 TikTok shop to buy a product through, and so you’re going to have a huge percentage of people who are like, okay, yeah, this product looked pretty cool, thanks to this video. I’m not gonna click this button to buy it on TikTok shop, but let me just open up my Amazon app and buy it, and this is why some people are like, even if you’re breaking even on TikTok shop, there’s still a net positive gain for you because now you’re getting this ads-free salewhere somebody’s just going directly to your product on Amazon by searching for it, and where you didn’t have to go through all the costs of acquisition, and so guys, no matter what you do on TikTok shop, it is going to bleed over to Amazon.
Chris:
Yeah, one other piece of that real quickly. So we usually, some of the brands that we work with on TikTok, 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 600 to 700% on searches, branded searches in general for their products.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, Chris, thank you so much for joining us. Like we mentioned, you’ll be back in a few months to show 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, and we’re gonna be transparent.You guys can see the sales. TikTok shop tells you exactly how many sales these products are having, so you guys can follow it over time. Look up groove learning, look up graceful by design on TikTok shop. All right, I’m excited to see in the next couple weeks the movement from these samples, and guys, if you don’t watch it on TikTok shop, just look out for the email, and we’ll invite you to our next webinar. We’re gonna show you the results. Thank you guys so much, and thank you, Chris, and we’ll see you guys in the next episode. Bye-bye now.
Chris:
Thanks, guys.
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