Transcription
Here's the guide on how to sell 1 million on TikTok Shop from somebody who's done it. In this video, I'm going to go over how I went from zero to 1 million sold on TikTok Shop. I don't have anything to sell; I'm just looking to build a community of people that sell on TikTok Shop to talk to.
So, if you're new to the channel, my name is Ryan. I am the founder of Mau Superfoods. I started in e-commerce around 2014 while I was in law school, became a lawyer, decided I liked selling online better, and I was pretty good at it. So, I went all in on my brand, and we've gone on to sell over $30 million, some of that on TikTok Shop, a lot of it on Amazon. In this video today, I'm going to break down how we succeeded on TikTok Shop so that hopefully you can get some of these things set up for yourself and start to replicate my success with your own brand.
Let's address the elephant in the room: it's possible TikTok Shop and TikTok as a whole could get banned pretty soon if the sale doesn't happen. I'm just going to operate assuming that that's not going to happen because I feel personally that it's unlikely that that will actually transpire. So, let's go forward as if that's not going to happen. The opportunity on TikTok Shop is unmatched as far as e-commerce brand potential to scale quickly goes. If you see a brand like Goli Nutrition selling ashwagandha gummies, they're currently bringing in over $10 million a month on TikTok Shop alone. That doesn't even include all their sales on their website and retail Amazon as a result of getting this additional traction on social.
This is something that you should be paying attention to if you're running an e-commerce brand, especially if you're doing DTC. There's a lot of competition, but if you look at TikTok Shop in comparison to Amazon, there's actually not very much. Truth be told, there's probably only about 10 people that really know what they're doing on TikTok Shop. Most brand owners simply do not have the marketing chops to make it on TikTok Shop; they don't have the risk threshold, they don't have the ability to pivot and adapt, and test things without a proven ROI. So, there's really not that much competition. If you're somebody who's willing to take some risks and stabs in the dark, you could potentially make this work, and I'm hoping I can help you with that.
The majority of our sales on TikTok have been with products like our black seed oil, and we have capsules, gummies, and a whole bunch of different things. We've sold probably close to 100,000 units; you can check on Shop and verify for yourself. The thing is, I didn't pick these products specifically to launch on TikTok Shop; we were already doing well on Amazon. This is just a new channel for us.
So, the question is: how do I launch a product for TikTok Shop? What you need to do is figure out where there is a market, a large enough target addressable market that you could sell potentially a million dollars a month with that product. A good example would be a product that every pet owner should have. If your product fits that entire market, that audience, then it's a potential for a mega viral product. If it's something where only a very small percentage of people would need it, like maybe it's for a skin condition that only 0.5% of people have, the chance of it going viral and bringing in mega millions is very low.
How do you validate a target addressable market and a product in general? What I would do is look on Amazon to see if there are products similar to yours addressing a similar customer that are doing 10,000 units a month. I like 10,000 units a month as a benchmark for the market being large enough that I can make a pretty decent amount of money selling this product or something similar to it. The next thing you would do is go to Google and use the Google Insights tool. You can see keyword search trends as they progress over the years.
What I would do is type in a keyword for a type of product you want to sell or something similar, back it up by five years, and see if that has progressed in the right direction or is just getting started. There are some products that you'll see that have only gone viral in recent years, like for example, snail mucin—it's like a snail cream that people put on their face. Nobody really cared about that until TikTok started to make it viral, but the target customer was people that want their skin moisture to improve, which is a huge market.
What you would want to do is look at the underlying customer and the pain that they're trying to solve and see if that is progressing and doing well. If you want to search specifically by the type of product you're going to sell, you should do that. But sometimes the best opportunities are not necessarily the ones that are already being sold. Sometimes you have to get ahead of that curve, and you have to actually be the one that creates the market; you have to create the demand. That's kind of like what we were doing for black seed oil. When we started on TikTok, there wasn't a lot of demand and people searching for black seed oil at all, or awareness for that matter. So, we had to kind of get that market created, but the product has a lot of different things that it could address and a lot of customers, so the potential market is huge. You just have to find which market to target this product to.
We tried every channel to sell on. I think if you're going to create an e-commerce brand today, you need to be on two channels: you need to be on Amazon and you need to be on TikTok Shop. Everything else is pretty much irrelevant, I would say, at least for starting. Amazon is where people go to check products, price compare, and see what reviews are like. Anytime they make a buying decision, they're going to check on Amazon, like the smart consumer is going to do that. TikTok Shop, because of the virality and the built-in commerce platform, which is really great, you want to get in on that as soon as you can. Assuming it's not going anywhere, the longer you wait, the more behind you just get. So, it's really the time to do it. If you're a DTC brand and you're not on TikTok Shop, you need to get on; you need to figure it out right now.
You don't necessarily need a Shopify store. Shopify is kind of useful as a platform to integrate all your different channels, but it's not necessary. If you use Shopify, like I was originally using Shopify and still am, you can install an app like CED Commerce or AfterShip to connect TikTok Shop sales to Shopify, and then Shopify will request fulfillment through whatever warehouse you're connected through there. The best one being probably Amazon MCF. You can connect Shopify to Amazon, so all your orders go from TikTok to Shopify, and then Amazon will actually fulfill it. That gets sent back to your Shopify store, and then Shopify sends it back to TikTok. So, it's kind of like a chain: TikTok, Shopify, Amazon.
The other way that you could do it to simplify it, if you don't have a Shopify store, which you don't really need if you're a beginner and you're just starting out, you could connect TikTok Shop directly to Amazon MCF. There are applications that Amazon recommends; I'm going to put those on the screen here. These three are the ones that Amazon recommends to connect TikTok Shop to Amazon MCF.
So, that's pretty much all you need to know on that part. A very important aspect of TikTok Shop and scaling on TikTok Shop is you need to make sure everything is connected well, and you're checking customer questions. You're also checking that the orders are going out and that shipping and tracking are all connected properly. If your product goes viral and you get 200 sales in a day, for example, and your logistics is not connected right, you're going to have a really hard time fixing that, and you might get banned from the platform. So, you need to be checking anytime you're getting an order every single day to make sure that everything is communicating smoothly. Ask me how I know that—I almost got my shop banned because I wasn't paying attention for one day. Okay, so it's really critical to pay attention and make sure everything's working.
Alright, let's get into the part about increasing sales because that's all that anybody really cares about. They don't care about how to connect things or where the opportunity is; like, that's probably why you're here, right? You want to know how to sell more, and it's really pretty simple. It comes down to three components.
The first thing is you want to be sending a lot of samples out for your product to the right people that are likely to convert into buyers. You want buyers; you want content— as much content as you can out there. There are two main ways to get content. The first is with the TikTok Shop integrated affiliate sample program, which is great. There's an option to auto-approve samples, or you could actually just manually approve them once per day. That's what I'm still doing. What I do is I go in there and I find sample requests that are from creators who have sold over $1,000 in GMV and have at least an 80% post rate. If they have those two criteria met, I'm pretty much just sending samples to all those people.
The second thing that you need to do is increase the amount of sample requests that are coming in because you're not going to get sample requests as a brand new shop. Everybody knows that. If you've tried getting some traction on TikTok, you probably know that. What was recommended to me by my rep and what I'm using is an app called Uka AI. I have a link down below; it's an affiliate link because I'm an affiliate with them, but this application is really great, and it's also officially sanctioned by TikTok Shop and their reps. What this does is automatically go out, find affiliates, contact them, and get them to request samples for you 24 hours a day.
There are ways to go faster than this app; I'm not going to talk about them here, but this one is the easiest way to get this process started. Okay, so I would sign up for that; use my link. Thank you for using it; I get a commission. There are settings in Uka to take this to the next level that I've sort of found through trial and error, which maybe I can share with you guys in a separate video if you subscribe.
Once you have content going out there from samples, it might not be enough high-quality content to go viral; you might just be getting a couple hundred views. What you want to do is send out, I'd say, 300 to 500 samples so that at least you have a decent shot at getting some traction there. The next thing that you want to do is find creators that are producing results for you and get them on retainer so that they can post for you every single day. Consistency is the name of the game, and you need to find content angles that work and then direct your creators to kind of go in that direction.
So, say you sell a snail mucin product that people take out of a jar and rub on their face. Maybe you find that the content that actually shows somebody putting it on their face with a certain type of angle—say, like, people that have severe sunburn or something—and you say, “My sunburn was peeling my face, and then I put this on, and now I feel great.” It's just like a 10-second video. If you have a really good example of a video that's been proven to go viral and convert, when you have people on retainer, you could just say, “Hey, make me seven more videos like this; let's see how it does.”
What you want to do is get people in a community where they're all sort of talking and sharing ideas. I like to use Discord for this, and we do weekly creator calls where we steer the creators in the right direction. I can make more content on this if you guys want, but this is really about finding creators that can produce consistent content and results for you, giving them consistent direction, and getting that system moving so that you always have content coming in every single day.
Ads are increasingly important. If you check the tools that show the top TikTok shops on TikTok right now, you can use a tool called Cow Data or Fast Moss to check those. What you'll see is the videos for most of these brands that are getting the primary lion's share of GMV driven to their store are ads. So, ads are critical. You don't want to rely on them 100% because ads do require a creative component, so you have to kind of make sure that you're not running ads to one piece of creative. You want a lot of creative so you can test everything with the ads.
What you can do is a new type of campaign called a GMV Max Campaign, which takes away the ad buying process entirely. They perform pretty well, and what you can do is set like a daily budget of, say, $500. Say you want a ROAS return of 2.5, which is pretty good. I would probably be more aggressive if I were trying to get traction and just set up a GMV Max campaign. That's really all you need to know to get started on ads; that should get you enough traction to get things moving. When you want to get more advanced, you can boost particular things, and there are ways to kind of step this up a notch, but GMV Max is really effective, I would say. They give you incentives; if you're watching this, you know when I'm recording it, November 18th, around that time, they do have incentives for ads when you use GMV Max. So, check it out; they'll actually pay for a lot of your ad spend.
The next thing that you want to make sure you're doing when you're launching is to have coupons and deals running pretty much all the time. Those are the basics of selling on TikTok. Just to recap the main components of it: you have to pick the right product, you have to make sure you have fulfillment logistics set up before you scale hard, you need to send out lots of samples, you need to automate sending out samples, you need to have content creators producing content regularly, getting them on retainer, and you need to run GMV Max ads. You just need to have ads running in general.
Those are the primary components. Of course, there are little tweaks and nuances in every single one of those components, and you have to get really good at it, but those are the basic six components. I had to count them live with you because I wasn't sure what the number was.
So, what I'm thinking about doing is making a TikTok Shop seller sort of mastermind community, but I'm not sure whether I'm going to do it or not yet. I have a link in my description of this video where you can opt in and let me know if you'd like to be a part of that group and be one of the founding members of it. So, make sure you click that opt-in.
The next thing is, if you are a brand owner and you're interested in getting content creators and affiliates, we have a Discord community with about 3,000 people in it—lots of well-trained content creators—and we connect them with brands, but it has to be a good fit. Send me an email at Ryan@stayviral.com with the subject matter "TikTok Shop YouTube," exactly like that. Inside the body of the email, tell me about your brand, why you think your product has the potential to go viral on TikTok, and any relevant details you think would make it more competitive for me to want to reply to you.
I'm probably going to get a lot of emails, and it's probably not smart for me to give out my email in a video, but I'm trying to make connections with brands here. So, if you feel like you're a good fit, send me an email. If you're not ready yet, that's fine; don't email me. Subscribe; I'm going to have more videos like this if this one does well. Hope to see you in the next one!