TikTok Shop Secrets to Explosive Growth for Shopify Stores w/ TikTok Expert Jordan West

Jay Myers: [00:00:00] Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of Shopify 1% podcast. We're doing something for the very first time today. We are. Pushing this podcast live as we are recording it right now to our YouTube channel. So if you're listening to this on Spotify or iTunes or somewhere else this is probably gonna come out within a week or two.

Because we publish it, we take out all of my ums and ahs and everything else and mine. And my guests ums and ahs. But if you're watching this live on YouTube, you're gonna get some ums and ahs, but you're gonna get the content before anyone else. And so this is a bit of an experiment and hopefully this goes well with the YouTube live.

So hello to everyone watching on YouTube Live. Feel free to put any comments in there questions. I may not be monitoring the questions while we're recording this, but we will definitely reply to anything. Post recording. So, because it stays up there as a video forever as well too. So with that, let's actually get into it because I'm [00:01:00] super excited for today's episode because one of the most requested topics I've got from our listeners is around.

TikTok selling through influencers leveraging TikTok shop. A lot of brands are seeing incredible success with it, and a lot of brands are just totally confused and they think TikTok is just like Instagram and they should just put up some content on there. What they don't realize that it, TikTok is.

Transforming from a media company to a sales channel, and there's a lot happening. And so I have with me, Jordan West, he's the founder and CEO of Social Commerce Club, and he's kind of at the forefront of a lot of things happening with TikTok. I've watched a few of your webinars and events that you've done, and I think, uh, one thing I appreciate about you is you're really pushing the, well, you're at the front of trends and I think in.

In commerce, there's always a point where, [00:02:00] you know, 10 years ago you could. Kill it with Facebook ads, and that's kind of not the case anymore, right? I think right now some brands are killing it with TikTok shop, maybe that won't be the case in five years. Who knows? Maybe they, maybe it'll be even bigger in five years, but right now, brands that are taking advantage of it are seeing incredible success.

And so there's kind of like this window of opportunity. So excited to dive into this with you today. Jordan give us a quick little background on who you are, just so our listeners at least have some context.

Jordan West: This is great. I think that's the longest that I haven't talked in a long time. I was waiting.

I could see you. I'm like just itching to go there. Yeah,

Jay Myers: let out. Okay.

Jordan West: Jay I'm ready to dive in. Yeah,

Jay Myers: yeah,

Jordan West: yeah. For for people who don't know me, my name's Jordan West. I owned a bunch of brands. I say seven, but I think it's actually nine. when I look back on, like, my very first brand was a hoverboard brand.

I was on Shopify way back in the day. I think it was like 2013, 2014,

Jay Myers: like one of those ones that with the one wheel in the middle that you. One? No, it was the two

Jordan West: wheel ones. It was the two wheel ones. Oh, okay. And like I was making [00:03:00] content for these hoverboards, and I actually sold a lot of them.

 we did really, really well. And, but then, like they, I don't know, one in five of them would malfunction and I was like, I don't want to do this. And I just didn't wanna sell other people's products I know there's probably some drop shapers listening to this. I'm just not that guy. I love having our own product.

So from there. My wife and I started a baby clothing company, became one of the top baby clothing companies in Canada, really well known. We leveraged that to then just buy a bunch of brands down in the States and here in Canada, and we just kind of went for it. Through all of that. I had an agency that was just kind of sitting on the side at the time it was called Mindful Marketing.

And when we exited our last brand last year, we there was one, sorry, one went bankrupt. Just everyone knows that does happen. I want everyone to feel like that's very normalized because I think in the next little while, especially our American friends, this is going to need to be very normalized.

This happens And sometimes it's just factors that you have control over and sometimes it's not. Either [00:04:00] way it's. Just, let's just normalize failure because that is a normal part of, of everything. I think it's what you do afterwards, right? That really matters. So anyway, yeah. Exited one brand last year, had one brand go bankrupt.

And I didn't have any brands. I was brandless and I was like, I had the agency and I was like, you know what? I think I'm gonna go all in on this. And I found TikTok shop and I was like, this is wild. Because when we were, you know, with our brands working with influencers, I hated it. The reason I hated it is because it was not very there was just such a lack of transparency with what I was going to get.

It was like, okay, so I'm gonna pay you a thousand bucks. You have a hundred thousand followers, what am I gonna get? You're just kind of paying, hoping, and what also, what kind of post am I gonna get? Are you gonna actually talk about my product? Are you just gonna be in a bikini and show my product up here?

Like, nobody's looking at my product, you know, just FYI. Yeah. And so. I could never understand how to actually work in a win-win sort of way With influencers, affiliate models [00:05:00] kind of work, but at the same time, like affiliate tracking isn't great and there's always like this loss. And then you could do like coupon code tracking.

The problem with coupon code tracking is honey then takes that coupon code and then serves it to people. So then you think that influencer's doing way better. So then TikTok shop comes around and my buddy Brock he owns a company called Frost Buddy. He got ahold of me and he's like, Jordan.

We're gonna do 500 K this month on TikTok shop. And I was like, what TikTok shop? I was like, isn't that just like meta shops? And he's like, no. You have to check this out because you know, when Meta came out with their shop, I'm like, oh great. Another place to check out. Like who cares? Right? it didn't really matter to me like, okay, so you can check out on social, and I thought that's what TikTok shop was.

And then when I realized what it actually was, that was when my mind was blown and I'm like, how is every brand not hopping on this?

Jay Myers: So you've said, I can't remember, I heard you say this, that you, that TikTok shop is the biggest change in e-commerce in the past 10 years. Absolutely. [00:06:00] So what makes it that significant and for Shopify, for e-commerce brands?

So the

Jordan West: reason why it's such a big deal is that it goes from the, the previous way that we've done marketing, right? In this sort of like one to many brand to all sense, right? And what we're doing now. I call it like the multi-level marketing of our day, right? We are now giving the power. To these like million plus, I think it's over a million creators now on TikTok shop that are signed up for TikTok shop.

So basically the way that it works right, is that you have creators on this side, and I don't like to call them influencers because they're not influencers, right? Right. And I'll explain why in a minute. Yeah. So you have creators over here who are incentivized. The only way that they are incentivized.

Is to sell your product, right? They're not incentivized in any other way. Like very few of them will get retainers, right? Like you can kind of like set [00:07:00] retainer deals, but very few of them are incentivized in that sort of way. They are incentivized to sell a bunch of your product, so the kinds of creative that they're going to make and the sort of things that they're going to do are meant to sell your product.

That is what they're trying to do at the end of the day. Right. They're not trying to build themselves an audience versus like, like I, I don't know if you know this Jay, like I do a lot of like influencer work in the B2B space. I am so picky about the brands that come to me. Like I've rejected, I don't know, four to five of the SaaS companies that have come to me recently.

'cause I'm like, eh, I don't like your product. Right. That's what an influencer has to do. Yeah. Because they, the influencer has to keep their audience. Trusting them, right? Like at the end of the day, that's all that I have is trust and so I'm very picky. These are not, that creators are not that their goal is to sell your product.

Right. And they do an incredible job at that. And so when I saw that and I saw that, oh my gosh, there's finally a win-win with creators and brands together. Like there's no other [00:08:00] win-win that I can think of in the creator world, right? Like affiliate marketing again, tried to do it, but it didn't work because it's not a closed ecosystem.

But this being a closed ecosystem, it's incredible. We have creators in our high GMV creator network who have paid off their house this year, like it's in one year. Wild, how much they're making.

Jay Myers: what is a typical percentage like margin? Like what does a creator make? Does the brand set the rates that they take?

Jordan West: Totally. So on TikTok shop, there's sort of two different ways that you can do this. So you can set an organic affiliate commission and then you can set an ads driven or affiliate commission. So we set two different commissions, obviously. Right? So the first one that we're gonna set is for organic and we're gonna give as much as humanly possible.

Now, what brands do not realize, right? And this is like classic human psychology brands will look, I'll be like, Hey, why don't we offer 40%? They're like 40%. That's astronomical. We can't do 40%. I'm like. So what is your break even return on ad spend on [00:09:00] Facebook ads? Oh, well, it's like 1.8. Totally. So you're willing to spend actually 60%.

Yeah, 60%. Just remember, it's just that like numbers with people. Like we all get fooled by that, right? If we don't just like think with our logical brain, because 40% sounds like so much, well, that's a 2.5 return on ad spend. Great. I would take that all day long. Yeah. Yeah. And so I like to tell them like, Hey if you can go with a 40%.

Commission on organic at first and then set that ad commission way down, like do like 10% on ad driven commission. Right. Do something on ad driven commission

Jay Myers: because, okay, so let me like, before you go on, 'cause a couple questions. Okay. So ad commission, so organic is, it's when they create, when they drive the traffic themself, it's their own audience.

They're, it's all them. You're not paying anything.

Jordan West: Yeah.

Jay Myers: All the algorithm

Jordan West: you're

Jay Myers: paying and not their audience.

Jordan West: That's a, all the, that was actually a misspeak because, right. Remember, these creators don't really have audiences like, no, had a no TIC TikTok

Jay Myers: [00:10:00] finds the right people to show it to.

Right. Like, it's not, let's just, it's not your followers, it's. That's the whole beauty of Yeah. That's

Jordan West: why they're not influencers, right? Because they don't really have much of a following. People aren't follow following, they're just creating good context. Yeah. Because 'cause of the way that tiktoks algo works, it's just all content based, not follower based at all.

Right. Whereas Instagram still has the follower base. Right. It still has follower Plus it's trying to get into the TikTok world. Yeah. Right. That's why. Yeah so if their piece of content goes absolutely viral, right, they're gonna make a ton of money organically.

Jay Myers: And then ad commission is when they create the content, but then you boost.

You boost it.

Jordan West: Exactly. So the way that works is that there's two different ways they can either turn on let every single one of these ads go into an ad campaign. That's really easy for us as an agency for brands. Right. Because what, what ends up happening and as of July 15th, probably after this episode is actually out, all campaigns have [00:11:00] to be using tiktoks AI campaign system, which is called GMV Max.

What GMV Max does is it gathers all the content together. So, any content that you're tagged in, it brings into the campaign and it puts ad spend behind that content. And so, oh, interesting. Yeah so whatever you, your product has been tagged in, it will grab and put into that trying to get you the best return.

These are all target ROAS campaigns, and so the higher you set your target roas, the less of the budget that it's gonna spend trying to get you To that target roas. So the lever that you have to pull is the more creative that you get out there, and the more that you get tagged in it, the better Now I would say 50 50.

Right now, creators have this auto tag feature on. The other 50% of the time as an agency, we have to go out and go get this, these spark codes from the creators to then use in the campaigns. So our team like, and that's a very manual sort of process. Yeah. We use one tool called Reacher, which I love these guys.

I've [00:12:00] advised them for quite a while. They have a feature where you can just like auto reach out to anyone who's tagged you and say, Hey, can I get the spark? people are incentivized to give you the spark code because they get paid on whatever affiliate commission is even run through ads.

Jay Myers: Okay? So.

If someone tags your product or your brand? Yeah. In a post. Just your product. Just your

Jordan West: product. Yeah. It has to tag your product to your TikTok shop.

Jay Myers: Gotcha. Okay, so then the new algorithm for the AI ads, you can you pull in those reels and use them as like UGC user generated ads on your. Through your ad account.

Jordan West: That's exactly how it works, yeahinteresting. And that is interesting. The only way that it works now, right? So when we think about how behind everybody is right now in meta, it's like the amount of accounts that I see whitelisting, I don't know 1%. Yeah. It's a name of your podcast, right? It's like.

Yeah, the amount TikTok has figured out that [00:13:00] whitelisting is the only thing that works right. It is the thing that actually drives everything. This is just a giant whitelisting campaign with a huge amount of influencer seating. So that's why I'm so obsessed with this at Social Commerce Club.

Jay Myers: Did you say that as of January 15th, you won't even be able to like run your own content?

It's only the AI driven ads pulled in, or you can still do both?

Jordan West: So you, no, you, there's no more manual campaigns for TikTok shops specifically. So as of July 15th now, except for we work with a lot of brands. They're called Global Key Account Brands at TikTok, these are brands that do 4 billion and above in multiple markets.

So we work with a lot of those kind of brands, those we have extra levers for. The average person listening to this does not have those levers, unfortunately. but. I really believe that their system is getting that good. They have so much learning behind it. That's why they've decided to go to pure GMV Max.

Now you can get your own content on there, but you have to post it on your page and then tag it so you can still do dark [00:14:00] posts. Right I think we're all kind of familiar with that in like Facebook Advertising World. You can still do dark posts.

Jay Myers: Just explain it just so our listeners, dark posts like posting through other accounts, that is it essentially like fudging.

User generated content? No.

Jordan West: No that's not the way I'm using Dark Post. I'm actually using it as you post it to your account, but you leave it hidden. So there's still a post ID that it pulls. Gotcha. But it doesn't actually go into the organic algorithm again, we work with a lot of like really big, well-known brands who do not want to destroy their feed.

They're very cognizant. If we're gonna test 50 different videos in a day, they don't want 50 videos going out on their TikTok, right? But we have to post it through their brand handle. Now, we could post it through other people's handles, but then we're gonna be paying more organic commission. So the more videos that brands can get out there, the better and the more angles and all of that, so they may not wanna post it on their page.

I recommend brands post 10 times a day on TikTok. It does not matter how many times you post it is all that they care about is the amount of the amount of [00:15:00] impressions that it's going to get out there and whether or not it has virality or not. They want you to post more so in so much so in fact that their algo right now is tuned.

And the reason why I know that their algo is tuned, they have not told me this, but I've asked, I always ask my TikTok people, I'm like, Hey. What are your core KPIs right now? They're like, oh, the amount of videos that brands post on their own page is one of our big KPIs. We're trying to get people to do that more.

I'm like, oh, awesome. I know that their algo is tuned to help brands do more of that.

Jay Myers: Interesting. So obviously then the more the better. Reverse engineer that. Yeah,

Jordan West: totally. Because tons of brands are still not even on TikTok. They just don't even know the TikTok muscle, which is crazy. It's like this is the biggest top of funnel channel that there is out there right now.

And the amount of brands that are not on just TikTok in general is wild. Right. And so that's what TikTok is trying to do is like get people on Similar to Facebook, right? Right now the biggest opportunity is. Actually just post as a brand on Facebook. Remember back in the day, like these be, people get mad reach, we would get like [00:16:00] tens of thousands of impressions on every post, and then their reach went down and down and down.

Well, Facebook is back now being the, I would call it, the second biggest opportunity right now is like just post your videos on Facebook.

Jay Myers: Just, well, yeah, that's it. That's what we talked about with the intro. Right. Okay. So how does. Just let's go to the beginning here. If let take a brand that's not even posting on TikTok.

Now let's start from the beginning. Like someone's like. Wants to get into this. I wanna get into how they actually find creators do this. But like, should you build up your profile first? Should you post a whole bunch of organic stuff first, or if I wanna, if I have a store and I wanna start selling on TikTok, live through creators, and I have zero posts, I have zero followers.

I just created my TikTok account. Am I gonna have no social clout to like go and get creators to post it? Is it, should I be product seeding and sending, like, what's, like, you own a brand right now, Jordan West and you don't have a TikTok presence. What are you doing? [00:17:00]

Jordan West: Okay, so let me walk through my strategy here.

I call it's a blitz strategy, so. Number one, if you have no followers on TikTok, you cannot open a shop. I believe you need somewhere around one or 2000 minimum followers. So you need to go get those followers, right? So you can run an ad campaign to get followers. Yep. So just go do that. Have

Jay Myers: a couple posts, boost the posts.

Jordan West: Exactly. Just go get those followers. That'll be really, really quick and really cheap. So make sure you get those creators don't care. They don't care about your page, they don't care about your brand. All that they care about is whether or not they can make money. Remember that, right? Like

They even, like with huge brands that we work with, lots of creators are like, well, I don't know if we can sell it at that. I don't know if it's gonna go for that. Why is the pricing more on TikTok than it is on other channels? Like all of these things, that's what the creators actually care about. They're

Jay Myers: thinking like an owner.

Yeah.

Jordan West: Yeah. Totally. Totally. They're just thinking to, to themselves like, we'll, like they don't care about the brand association or anything like that. They're not building a [00:18:00] following. Right. They're just trying to make money. Right. And so. And so this is how we start and how I would recommend any brand.

I'll use the, I'll use the number 50,000 just because I think that's a good number actually. Let's use a hundred thousand. Just so it's easy. Now you can move that down if that's 10,000 for your brand, right? That you have to invest. Great. I'm gonna use a hundred thousand and how we're going to use this a hundred thousand dollars to, to launch.

So at the beginning, and actually TikTok has some really good really good incentives for D two C brands right now. So if you're doing over a million bucks right now. They actually have awesome incentives for you guys to come in I think they give like a bunch of ad credit, they do white glove onboarding, all that kind of stuff.

So I can send you a link after that. They have to actually get that. But like they want D two C brands in. So this is, yeah, this is good. I'm glad that we're having this combo. Yeah, I am. Their Their mouthpiece here. they should gimme something though. Don't you think they

Jay Myers: should? They let you hang out at their booth at Chop Talk the whole time there, right?

That's right . No, they give me all sorts

Jordan West: of Yeah. Cool things. Just not money, you know, like [00:19:00] Right. You know, at the end of the day, like, just send me something cool. No, they'll gimme a boat or a plane or something at some point. One day. Yeah. I'm playing the long game with TikTok. Yeah.

Okay. So here's how I would start. So number one, I would identify my first hundred to 200 creators, right? So for us at the agency, it's really simple. We have a high GMV Creator network and we have creators that are in different industries and different verticals. And so we actually just identified them at first for you, you're gonna have to actually reach out.

To creators. and first of all, just identify who you're gonna go after and how do you do that? How do so use a tool? So you can either go into TikTok, shop affiliate center, right, and you can manually do this. That's gonna take you hours upon hours, just

Jay Myers: scrolling through creators, finding ones that you like, their content.

There may be, I don't know, like if you sell beauty products, they're focused on beauty products. If they sell health and wellness or like that kind of a, okay. Yeah.

Jordan West: Or you can use a tool like Reacher that's like the easiest. There's reacher and [00:20:00] Yuca are kind of the, the two big ones. Uptick is another one.

I recommend Reacher just because I've advised them for so long and told them to build everything. I'm like, nah, we now need this now. No, we need this so anything that I've wanted they've built because I've been there. They're sort of like primary advisor.

Jay Myers: Well, if it's good enough for you, it's good enough for our listeners.

Jordan West: Yeah, well that's kind of my thought is like, is, unless people are seeing things that I'm not, but we work with a lot of brands. We see a lot of stuff out there. So, and also just, you know, TikTok is building stuff for us all the time too. Like lots of the stuff that you guys see in GMV Max is from our team.

You know, we spend tens of millions of dollars on the platform. So they're like, oh, okay, we'll listen to them. So I've heard

Jay Myers: that from other people too, that they're extremely responsive to feature. Suggestions from like from agencies like you. You can't even get ahold of someone probably at Meta, but it's crazy

Jordan West: when you're in TikTok and you realize, and then you go back to Meta and you're like, oh yeah, we like.

We have no support whatsoever from them. Yeah. Or like voice comparatively to TikTok. Yeah, it's wild. [00:21:00] there's also their own like messaging platform, so like at any point I could just like go ask a question to one of my people and they'll like immediately get back to me, which is really great.

That's awesome. So yeah, it's, it still feels like a small team, which is funny. That's why they're, it's not I was at their Seattle TikTok shop's head offices in Seattle, and I was there recently. And it's a very big team. It's Oh, I'm sure, multiple floors and like, yeah it's really cool. So, going back here, so we're gonna identify the creators.

We're gonna use a tool like Reacher to identify the creators. Then, sorry, and

Jay Myers: just real quick on, on Reacher, does it. Actually find creators? Or is it just the tool to automate reach

Jordan West: outs and so it actually finds the creators too. And some really cool features that we've helped build into or like AI features.

So they actually go and scrape these creators. So say TikTok, say it's not in like one of tiktoks categories. So let's say that we're looking for a very specific look of a creator, right? Right. This was something, especially when you work with really big brands, they [00:22:00] want very. Very tight tight looks for their creators.

Right. Very difficult to do on TikTok shop. So we actually got an AI to go and scrape that. And so you can actually now put in filters like that.

Jay Myers: Like you might, if you sell a skincare product, you might actually be looking for someone that has acne or Totally. If you all plus size products, you want someone who's plus size or whatever, right.

Like Exactly. And you can't

Jordan West: find that on normal filters. Right. And TikTok iss not gonna put that into their filters, so Yeah. That's super interesting. Yes, this AI actually goes and scrapes that and so that we can actually go and find those people. Right. Wow. So now we reach out to, you know, if we're trying to get, say, 200 creators, we're probably gonna have to reach out to 2000 of them.

So you get, before any sales, you get 2000 reach outs. okay. And then you actually have to make sales on your store. So,

Jay Myers: sorry.

Jordan West: And

Jay Myers: the reach out

Jordan West: is just like DMing a creator. Exactly. True. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, so we're gonna do our first 2000 reach outs, but this is the key here, and this [00:23:00] is what I am preaching to everyone.

Do not, if you're gonna go into TikTok shop, do not dip your toes. You cannot dip your toes. This isn't Facebook ads where you can be like, oh, I'm gonna spend 50 bucks a day. No You cannot do that. You have to go and you have to go all out if you're going to do it. So whatever budget that is, just know you have to go all out.

And this is the strategy that I've seen work time and time again. With, now I was gonna say with any size budget, it's not with any size budget. You need to have like minimum $10,000 to do this budget.

Speaker 6: Okay.

Jordan West: So you're gonna We're gonna reach out to our first our first 2000 creators. We're looking to get 200 creators.

Now the reason why you're probably going to be able to get that is you're going to tell them a compelling story about this blitz launch that you're going to do. Hey, we are new on TikTok. We are offering 40% commission. And we're doing something really interesting you probably haven't seen before. We're gonna do a blitz launch, so we don't want you to post as soon as you get the product.

We want you to get three to [00:24:00] five videos ready for the blitz launch, and we're gonna be putting, now of the a hundred thousand, I would say we're gonna be putting $70,000 in the first weekend into this launch. Are you with us? Right? We're gonna be putting 70,000 in ad spend behind it. And we're offering 40% commission.

Well, it's pretty hard for them to say no to that. Right. And that's awesome. They be a part of a fun event. Yeah.

Jay Myers: And just when the ads, is it driving to their specific content or like. Where are the ads driving to? GMV Max is going to pull from all things that you're tagged in. Okay. So anything they produce, as long as it's tagged, it's gonna get amplified because of that ad spend.

Jordan West: Exactly. And they generally ones that do well organically. They're going to Gotcha. Is going to do well as a paid ad. So that's why we tell them we're like, post as many times as you can. 'cause we're gonna put a ton of ad spend behind it on this first weekend. Yeah. So what this does it, it creates a flywheel, right?

It creates this flywheel because now [00:25:00] everyone is seeing them everywhere. They're like, oh my gosh, this brand is literally everywhere.

Speaker 6: Right.

Jordan West: And it's, but it's not just, it's not just customers that are seeing it everywhere, right? It's also other creators that are seeing it everywhere. So these creators now, were like, oh my gosh, this product is blowing up.

I wanna get on this product. And what will happen is some creators, they'll, they know what a viral product looks like, and they'll be like. Oh, sweet. They'll actually go into a store and go buy that product if it's a retail product, or they'll go to their Shopify site or Amazon and just go buy the product.

Because they can't wait for the sample because they're like, I just want the product right away and I want, and I wanna hop on this. That's how you launch on TikTok shop. And a lot of brands, like they'll come to us and we'll tell them about the split strategy. Like, ah, we just can't commit. We just want to kind of like slowly.

Try this out. I'm like, then don't, and yeah, then don't because it's not a channel like that. It's not like an Amazon where you can just have your product there so that when people are searching, you're there like, right. It's not

Jay Myers: that you gotta go. [00:26:00] Yeah. Something I just thought of. So do you find creators?

Do they ever demand or in request that, well, if I'm gonna be a creator, you have to be doing at least x amount of ad spend towards it. So yes. So

Jordan West: bigger creators. Yes. And this is actually something we help TikTok build out in their, in GMV Max, so you can actually now allocate certain amounts of spend into those creators if you want.

Jay Myers: Okay. And you can I personally haven't sold through TikTok shops, so I'm asking all the dumb questions here, so, yeah, that's great. So you can, in your. Seller dashboard, a sale that came through an ad, a promoted click pay a different commission versus one that did not come through. One of, through your ad spend.

Jordan West: Yes Okay. And so TikTok takes care of all of that in the background. They take care of all of the payments to creators, they take care of everything for you. And then at the end of the day, you get what's left over deposited into your bank.

Jay Myers: Gotcha. [00:27:00] Now, what do you recommend in terms of like, I think of a product I sell here?

I don't know. Let's think of something a case a hard, I got a hard drive on my desk. I'm looking at a hard drive indestructible case so I can drop my portable hard drive and I wanna send that to creators. Do you give the creators talking points and tell 'em all the features and benefits, or do you just send it to them and let them figure it out themselves so it can be organic where they're figuring it out.

Like any, what's the best process for that?

Jordan West: So the best thing to do is just to give them an overview. So remember, some of these creators will get like a hundred products a week, right? Wow. So you wanna make sure to set them up for success. They're not gonna go and do research on your product. So give them the talking points first.

Yeah. Right. Let them know like, hey here's kinda the big things people are talking about with this product. And then on the other side of this let them have, but be like, Hey, but whatever you think to sell this product, we trust [00:28:00] you. Here's a few examples of Other videos that have gone viral, just so you have some examples.

Jay Myers: Okay. What are I know you mentioned kind of a few of these, but like. What are the biggest mistakes you see brands making when they're trying to, they're like, they hear, oh, TikTok shop. Everyone's making money on it. And they go, and what are the mistakes they're making?

Jordan West: The biggest mistake is being too picky with creators, right?

So, number one, not going all in. That's a huge one. Being too picky with creators is another one not spending money on ads is another one, right? Like they'll just be like, oh, well it should just be organic. I'm sending out 200 samples. And it's like, well, no, because if you don't spend money on ads, then creators don't wanna post more.

The other one too is not just taking advantage of the creators that already have your products, right? And Sorry. Huge mistake is not getting them off the platform, right? So we use the blitz launch strategy to get them off platform into like WhatsApp or Discord. So that's another really. Really big thing.

Oh the conversation with the creators. Exactly. [00:29:00] Because we don't want the conversation to happen one-to-one over there. We want to have a community so that everyone's starting to share, Hey, I just had this video go viral. Hey, do you wanna like, and, and comment on this video. Like, we love to super ing build communities around every single brand.

Jay Myers: So your creators, they all, there's like, it's collaborative. They like helping each other.

Jordan West: Oh, they love it. Yes.

Jay Myers: Even though they're kind of competing, but there's, it's a sense of they're on the same team. Totally.

Jordan West: Because they know that the products that go viral, they're all going to get something from,

Jay Myers: right.

Right. The better they all do ultimately, then the more it boosts. And it's probably, you know, rising tide theory. Right? Sinks all ships. Yeah, exactly. So what, so you create a Discord group or a Slack group? Invite everyone in. Yeah. WhatsApp is

Jordan West: my is my number one recommendation right now is WhatsApp.

Yeah. It probably makes sense. That's more international too. Right? And you get notifications comparatively to like, like Discord and Slack. It's like, oh, another Slack group. Right. Like another group. Yeah.

Jay Myers: I can [00:30:00] sympathize with that. Yeah. Interesting. And then are you like nurturing this group and sending daily updates and this person did this and Hey John.

Absolutely. John just sold 10,000 products.

Jordan West: Yep. We have full time people just doing that, just nurturing the group. Wow. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, so that's

Jay Myers: essentially a role at a e-commerce company. That's a

Jordan West: Absolutely. It's like, this is like a, it's like treat these, like remember this is your ad spend, right.

These people are your ad spend.

Jay Myers: Okay. I want to touch more on the Amazon. Mistake, I guess if you wanna call it that. You said one time you've worked with brands that have crushed it on Amazon, but then just totally flopped on TikTok. And I imagine the same things too, like crushed it on Shopify or e-commerce, but then, then totally flopped.

 What is the difference in maybe some of like the algorithmic differences and brand identity versus. Product identity and can you touch on [00:31:00] some of that?

Jordan West: Totally. So TikTok Shop is really like an amalgamation of both of these, right? Of Amazon and Shopify together, which I think is what makes it so hard.

It's this brand new muscle that no one really has figured out yet. So Amazon, right, is inherently a demand capture channel, right? D to C is inherently, you have to be really good at demand gen, right? On, on D to C, but with D to C, we've been so spoiled with Facebook, right? Where it's like, ah, I'll just throw Facebook ads up and it's just gonna kind of work and that sort of thing.

And most people just stay away from influencers or creators or any of that kind of stuff. This is like. All of that, but then bring the influencer and the creator mix in. Interesting. Right. Okay. What are brands just don't get it. Amazon brands are the worst at this, right? Like for the most part? Yeah.

Like they just don't understand, like you have to learn how to generate demand for your product.

Jay Myers: Yeah Well that's why they're on Amazon, because [00:32:00] they don't know how to generate demand, and so they pay a marketplace fee and they are great. They're great at optimizing, like there's a whole strategy around optimizing and ranking on Amazon.

It's all about the ranking. It's not about generating demand. That could be a whole show because I do think we've seen some brands liquid Death is actually used to be, they were one of our clients for a long time and they were one of the first ones that I saw. They used our subscription software and I remember one day I went on their site and they were selling a case of Liquid Death for 1999 on their site, or 1699 on Amazon.

Jordan West: And I remember Oh, interesting. I remember hearing that.

Jay Myers: Yeah, and I thought, well, that's completely backwards. Like usually like Amazon charges 15%, whatever, you know, commission. And they should charge more on Amazon and give a deal for people who buy it on your site. But they took the opposite approach.

They actually drove all their traffic [00:33:00] to Amazon to create demand or push demand there, I should say, not create demand, and then ranked. High. And then eventually they captured position number one. And I think now, like if you search like mineral water, they're like one, two, and three. Now they own that, right?

And so there is a whole strategy around that as well too. But I think you're right. By default, Amazon sellers don't think that way. Like yeah.

Jordan West: Most people are not thinking like that. Now, momentous just recently did this with TikTok shop. They were sending a ton of Facebook ads. From Facebook over to TikTok shop.

I was like, what the heck are you doing?

Jay Myers: Interesting. Yeah. Makes sense. Like, yeah. Yeah. There is enough content already in this episode that is worth a million dollars to someone listening if they execute this. I just wanna get to a couple more questions that I had, 'cause I Talking around products are there, if you have a range of products, is there a sweet spot?

Maybe they can't be too cheap. [00:34:00] Like a $20 product doesn't have enough margin. And like, should a brand be thinking. You know, can we save someone wasting their time if they have a $20 product? And that's, does it have to be a hundred and 150 certain types of products? packaging. Do you create special packages for these creators that maybe aren't available on your website and you can call them like the TikTok bundles or whatever.

Totally. Tell me about what's a product strategy for this?

Jordan West: Yeah, so we've, I've had this discussion with so many brands so we've been lucky enough for TikTok to fly us out to a lot of the sort of like brands that everyone kind of knows and uses all the time. And this is like legitimately the question that they're asking all the time.

Like where do we put this? Because a lot of people thought, well, TikTok shop is just, it's like these lower priced. Products, and that's not necessarily true, but also a OV is a really big deal, so Right. You so high a OV products generally are not going to work. If you've got a product over a [00:35:00] hundred bucks, I probably wouldn't test unless you've got a really decent testing budget.

Jay Myers: Oh, interesting. Okay. There might have been a sweet spot higher 'cause the margins more, but. Maybe, but that's not the case. Maybe.

Jordan West: So we're working, we're, you know, we're in the mids of working with some pretty big high a OV brands right now, and we haven't quite got to launch yet, but just imagine what that seeding process looks like, right.

So, right That becomes pretty expensive. Right. Some like really big electronic companies you guys have probably all heard of, and trying to get those out to creators is a lot of money, right? Yeah. So I think that's the difficulty. So if you're sub $100. You know, we work with a brand that their A OV is around $80 sort of in the apparel space.

They're doing multiple millions of dollars a month and very profitable with this channel. So it definitely can be done in that sort of higher close to a hundred. I really recommend that brands get their A OV right around $50 if they can, if they're lower, right? So bundling strategies are really important now.[00:36:00]

What creators want is they want something that's special that people can't go buy anywhere else because they, yeah. What they feel like is like, well, I'm putting in the work for nothing and I don't want people, you know, I talk about the halo effect all the time, right? Go. People from TikTok going and purchasing on Amazon and D to C, I'm like, the halo effect is real.

Creators don't like the halo effect 'cause they don't get paid on the halo. Right? And so. That is the crux of the problem that you're trying to solve is how do I create something specifically for TikTok that creators can trust me, that we are not just trying to get them to go off the platform afterwards.

How do we do that? That's the really big thing.

Jay Myers: Yeah, makes sense. Then are you. Is everything getting, if you have a Shopify store, do the orders get pushed back into Shopify Min or are you fulfilling them through a TikTok order management?

Jordan West: No, those will get pushed back in. So there's a couple of different connectors that you can use. So one's called Shop Dance. That's our recommendation after ship is another one though. So, yes. So that is my [00:37:00] recommendation is always use a connector. Do not use the native Shopify connector. You need to use one of these connectors.

Shop dance is the best, in my opinion.

Jay Myers: Okay. And then once it pushes into Shopify, if you use any fulfillment service, it's just a regular order at that point. Exactly Now, multichannel

Jordan West: fulfillment is also a. A thing. So you can actually use like Amazon, you can use like some of your different warehouses, right.

To be able to do that, especially for bigger brands, that's a really good idea. I do not recommend using tiktoks fulfilled by TikTok UN until you get to a substantial amount of volume and you can make it make sense. There's not really any reason to use it from tiktoks perspective right now.

Jay Myers: Gotcha. And when would you tell a brand they're not ready to go on TikTok is I mean, could you go on TikTok if you're just doing.

$10,000. I don't know, maybe that's way too low, but like, you know, like if you're a smaller brand on E-com on Shopify, when would you say you're not ready for TikTok? You need to be at a certain scale. Obviously budget matters that you could put some ad spend behind it, but yeah. When would you say you're not ready yet?

[00:38:00] And why? Under a million. Don't do it. Don't do it under million

Jordan West: annual, annual revenue under a million annual revenue. don't do it. Just stay just wait till I just don't think, I think under a million, you haven't hit product market fit yet in a substantial sort of way. Just keep doing what you're doing there.

Right now, if I were to launch a brand from scratch today, I would use TikTok Shop as the initial channel. I think that it's the cheapest way to get a ton of traction right away and to get, so this is something wild that big brands that we're working with are talking about. They're talking about getting rid of entire parts of their business that are in like con, like the consumer psychology, the messaging, all of that, because our creators are doing it all.

They don't need to do these like test groups because the creators are the ones doing the test groups they're giving like, you know, we'll get like two to 5,000 videos a month. Well, that's two to 5,000 different angles that we're getting on the product that people are like, oh, never saw that one.

Interesting. And [00:39:00] you can see in real time how much people are actually reacting to that. So that's how I would launch a brand today is like straight on TikTok shop. With D two C and Amazon already set up I'd have all of them set up at TikTok shop as my like number one sort of channel. There's a great interview with the founder of Neuro Gumm recently where he talked about moving.

The majority of all of his budget is on TikTok Shop now. And that he's basically just retargeting on other channels, and that's it. And this is like a nine figure brand.

Jay Myers: Well, is there, have you seen people do just TikTok shop to launch without an eCommerce store?

Jordan West: Uh I have not yet done it with people, but I don't recommend it because you should have a Shopify store that it all runs through.

Like use Shopify as your, like centralized hub. As your hub. Okay. Yeah yeah. I mean there's not really much of a cost to you having that store up there, especially for the Halo. I would hate for you not to have just a decent Shopify site there. But just know that like your [00:40:00] everything engine can be TikTok shop if you do it right.

Jay Myers: Right. Makes sense. Jordan, this has been awesome. I know we're over time. You've been so gracious. Where can people find you? And I've attended some of your webinars and listened to some of your talks and like, where do you wanna send people? 'cause I think you are a wealth of information and we could probably talk for hours, but there's people right now that are like, excited about this.

They wanna learn more. They want to get start started with TikTok. Where do you wanna send them?

Jordan West: So I think the best place for people is just on YouTube you just search Jordan West e-Commerce. I post a new video, if not two, every single week on all of this. There's so much changing right now that I'm like constantly putting new stuff out there.

So YouTube is great And then. LinkedIn is another great place. So, and then from there you'll find my newsletter and that's kind of where I announce. Awesome. All the like live sessions and stuff that I'm doing. Go check out Social Commerce Club our agency.

Jay Myers: Awesome. And I'll make sure all the links are in the show notes.[00:41:00]

Jordan, thank you so much. This has been so much fun. This is fun. Thanks Jay.