#677 – TikTok Shop Advertising Guide

What if TikTok Shop could be the next big thing for your e-commerce business? Paul Harvey of Rankster, a seasoned expert in both Amazon and TikTok Shop, joins us to unravel the hidden potential of TikTok Shop’s dynamic platform for sellers looking to break new ground. Discover how Paul’s transition from teaching to mastering e-commerce reveals insights into leveraging TikTok Shop’s distinct marketplace, offering fresh opportunities for brands to thrive. We touch on the power of Helium 10’s tools that simplify integrating your Amazon inventory with TikTok, streamlining your sales strategy across platforms.

For those eager to maximize their sales, understanding TikTok’s unique environment is key. Not all products will shine here. While quirky and first-to-market items may capture the spotlight, more mundane offerings might fall short. We share intriguing success stories, like the unexpected popularity of premium sunflower seeds, underscoring the need for tailored strategies that resonate with TikTok’s unique audience. Learn from common pitfalls as we discuss why some Amazon sellers struggle to replicate their success on TikTok without adapting their approach.

Finally, we tackle the art of optimizing ad campaigns on TikTok, highlighting the game-changing GMV Max ads that promise impressive returns. Paul shares the significance of forging strong affiliate partnerships, and how features like Helium 10’s Influencer Finder tool can amplify your reach with the right creators. Whether you’re a veteran Amazon seller or a newcomer, these insights equip you to harness TikTok Shop’s potential, ensuring your business not only survives but thrives in this vibrant new landscape.

In episode 677 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Paul discuss:

• 00:01 – Mastering TikTok Shop for Amazon Sellers
• 01:40 – TikTok Shop Experience
• 06:14 – Aggregator Era Software Limitations
• 09:13 – Maximizing Sales on TikTok Shop
• 13:39 – Maximizing Sales Across Different Platforms
• 22:30 – Maximizing ROI With TikTok Ads
• 26:27 – GMV Max Delivery and ROI Optimization
• 31:51 – Fulfilling Orders Using FBA and TikTok
• 32:04 – Optimizing TikTok Sales and Fulfillment
• 37:40 – Maximizing ROI With GMV Max Ads
• 39:44 – TikTok Influencer Finder Tool for Sellers
• 41:28 – Creating AI-Powered Influencer Campaigns

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

How do you run advertising on TikTok Shop? How much commission should you offer TikTok Shop creators? How can you list your Amazon products on TikTok? In just seconds we go over these and more on today’s episode. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and the part of the e-commerce world we’re going to be talking about today is TikTok Shop. This is a new feature we have where, monthly, we have I don’t know, maybe call this a TikTok Shop Thursdays, all right, regardless of the day of the week. TikTok Shop is a great platform to sell on, and so each month we’re going to be featuring experts that we’re going to bring in to talk about different aspects, and today we’re going to talk about a GMV Max ads we’re going to talk about to find the best affiliates. We’re going to talk about hey, how can you connect your TikTok Shop to your Helium 10 account and then from Helium 10 to Amazon so you can fulfill your orders and a whole bunch of other things.

Bradley Sutton:

If you are already selling on TikTok Shop, this episode is for you. If you’re not selling on TikTok Shop yet, you want to get a little bit more information on it, this episode is for you. If you’re not selling on TikTok Shop yet you want to get a little bit more information on it, this episode is for you. Let’s go ahead and get into it. As I said, I’m kind of new to TikTok Shop. I am not. I would never have the audacity to call myself an expert on it yet by any means. So I always like to bring you guys expert information though. So to do that, we have brought in one of the top experts in the entire world on TikTok Shop, probably one of the most, uh, famous people on LinkedIn who talk about TikTok Shop, and we brought him in from across the pond. Paul, welcome to the show. How’s it going?

Paul:

Thanks, thanks, good to be here.

Bradley Sutton:

Where are you located right now?

Paul:

So ignore the accent, but I’m based in London, but I’m South African born and bred and just here right now.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. South African is my favorite um English accent. You know there’s so many English accents in the world that is my favorite, uh, in the world. I’m going to South Africa for the very first time in three weeks. I’m only gonna be able to spend a day or two going to Johannesburg and um and somewhere else, somewhere where I’m flying to, to the us from, but anyways, I’m or cape town, I’m going to cape town as well, so I might you might have to give me some restaurant, local restaurant, uh, suggestions in my first trip over there.

Paul:

I’m so jealous, I really am.

Bradley Sutton:

I love it, love it

Paul:

Like a year and a half since I’ve been home and I miss it like mad.

Bradley Sutton:

How long have you been uh there in the UK?

Paul:

So I um what? I originally lived in the UK for 10 years now, went home for 6 years to give another try in South Africa, but there’s no future of us there, so we came back and then here. We’ve been here now for about 2 years and yeah loving it, but I miss my home

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, yes, all right now. When did you get into e-commerce?

Paul:

I got um, so I got in about, I started in about 2012 and then I went full-time. Um, because I’m a former teacher and the ridiculous thing is, on the day my daughter was born was the day a kid punched me because I was in too good a mood, because my daughter was born, so that day I quit.

And that sounds like an awesome story. It really does. But knowing Amazon now, like that month I quit was my highest month in sales for the next two years, because two weeks after I quit, compared to come on board, that took 80 of my sales like um. We know the routine, we know the strategy. Unfortunately, I quit my job before I learned that strategy. I learned that those issues, so yeah, so but like, yeah, it’s awesome.

Bradley Sutton:

And then, how about did you, were you an early adopter of, of tick tock, like when it opened in the UK? No, what happened?

Paul:

I’m old school, so I’m ASM1. And if anyone knows what ASM is, you’ve been around for far too long. But basically I was doing Amazon and stuff. And then what happened was I’ve always run agencies and that type of stuff and SaaS tools, everything. And then during the aggregator era, they actually purchased a lot of my clients and they said, great, Paul did this for you, so let’s actually take on Paul. So I joined aggregator as, like their founding partners, everything, and it sounds like an awesome story, but I watched them spend 250 million euro in six months, wow and I tried my best to help their brands, but no, can’t go anywhere with them. And they were the first aggregator to go um, um, to actually go and solve it. So, yeah, so I learned a lot from there and I learned how to waste money.

Bradley Sutton:

I think the aggregators were very good with wasting money in their heyday. So when, at what point did you start seeing, hey, this TikTok Shop thing is pretty for real, because there have always been and there always will be a variety of marketplaces that people should, you know, expand to. After Amazon, first of all, people should be expanding to other Amazon marketplaces, like you know, like, hey, if you’re selling in Amazon UK, why aren’t you selling in Germany, in Japan? If you’re selling in USA, why aren’t you selling in Australia and India and other places? But then I think, for a few years, the kind of marketplace that everybody would say, hey, you need to expand to and you still should, everybody who can should expand is Walmart. But then, like I think now, overwhelmingly, if you were to ask people who are in the know, hey, if I’m only on Amazon, now, what is the very next thing that I should start? I would say the majority would say TikTok Shop. When did you kind of like I don’t want to call it a bandwagon per se, but when did you kind of jump on the TikTok bandwagon?

Paul:

So what happened was during the aggregator era. The aggregator I was with. They spent they wouldn’t tell me how much, but an embarrassing amount of money on the software. And the software what it would do? It would measure the verticals across all their brands, so Amazon, Walmart and so on and so forth, and whenever there was a sales increase or decrease it would tell you why, which is great, a really awesome piece of software. But every time I ran a TikTok ad campaign, we would see like a minor increase, but the software could not tell us why there was an increase in sales. And every time I said to the partners guys, this is happening because of TikTok ads, because of the TikTok content. And they said, no, Paul, if it was that, the software would tell us. And our pivot tables don’t tell us that, because aggregators love to use everything with pivot tables and they rely a lot on pivot tables. To this day I can’t do a pivot table.

Paul:

But I argued a lot with the founders of the aggregator to say, guys, if I were, were you, I would go all in on TikTok. And this was before TikTok Shop was launched. This was just TikTok posts. I said, guys, go all in on TikTok. And they say to me Paul, no, this is ridiculous. But a seller knows they won’t sell it and me being a long-time seller, you know when it works, so. So we knew it works. And I argued with the founders. They said, no, Paul, TikTok is just a flash in the pan, Don’t do it. And then we got so heated that I quit and walked away because of that very issue, because I believe in TikTok. They didn’t. And I said to you guys, I will prove you wrong. I started up my own TikTok newsletter and agency just to prove them wrong. I started up my own TikTok newsletter and agency just to prove them wrong that I was right. But the worst part was is they weren’t around long enough to kind of like prove to them I’m right and they’re wrong. And it’s kind of bittersweet when you go all out to prove someone’s wrong and then they’re not around anymore to do that.

Bradley Sutton:

What are some anecdotes you can give us about the success some sellers have had on TikTok? Like you know, you don’t have to give exact names if those are private, but like you can say, hey, there was this person who was doing you know six figures on Amazon and within three months they did like just something inspiring, just so the people here in this room can understand the opportunity that it is, because I would assume most are already Amazon sellers here. So what are some Amazon seller anecdotes who started on TikTok Shop that you can inspire us with?

Paul:

So the first thing to note and I always lead with this Amazon sellers we’re awesome, we’re smart, we’re scrappy, we know our stuff. But the biggest problem is every Amazon seller knows someone that went viral on TikTok. So they think, because they know someone, they will go viral, and that’s not the case. The main thing with TikTok is basically is your content sorry, is your product a good fit for their marketplace? If it’s not, you’re pushing a boulder up a hill. If it is, it just crushes it. For example, there are some brands they just list the product on TikTok and it works. And the reason it does that? Because maybe they were the first on the market to actually do that type of product, or maybe their affiliate or their influencer, whichever actually understands the product and knows how to sell in the video. So then it works really, really well.

Paul:

And we’ve had brands that they just post content and they immediately make sales. We have some brands that had like a 20x ROI on their ads and it really frustrates me because they wouldn’t spend more than $50 per day and they have a 20X ROI. In my mind, they’re printing money. Why can’t you spend a few thousand per day as opposed to $50? Some brands like that. It’s one of those things. The main thing is brands can do really well on TikTok if they have a good, good fit, if they put that deal for the brand. If it is, then at um TikTok Shop is the easiest platform to scale really is. If not, um, then amazon is your best place. I say that because, amazon, you can brute force your way to make a sale. If you have like a really aggressive bid on your PPC campaigns, you’ll make a sale On TikTok Shop. You can’t brute force your way to make a sale. That’s the biggest thing I’ll mention, because a lot of brands love to throw money at TikTok Shop but they don’t see any sales, and that always happens a lot of the time. I’m not sure if I answered your question properly, but yeah, I always lead with that.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, all right. So that’s important to understand. Like you said, you also said something important that you know there’s no like oh, every single product. If you sell it on Amazon, you are guaranteed to have X amount of success on TikTok. There are some products that will not do very well on TikTok at all. Like you might be selling sofas on Amazon, you probably are not going to have success on TikTok Shop Sofas is not that, you know, exciting or not that easy to sell? You know like boring products, very that easy to sell. Um, you know like like boring products, very boring product like. You know like like screws, like, hey, I have a five pack of screws. You know like, like, okay, maybe that has a place on Amazon. Or I’ve got a specific window washer on Amazon. Or a windshield wiper. You know like that’s, you know, maybe not the best for TikTok Shop.

Paul:

Just on that, I thought I’d add this, because often what I think will sell well on TikTok Shop does or doesn’t, and I say it’s always test everything. I had one product. The seller came to me he sells sunflower seeds at $200 a pack and he said to me that’s a lot of sunflower seeds. Actually it wasn’t even a lot, it was just like really good sunflower seeds, like a handful, like a thousand or so, and I was like no, come on god, this is not gonna sell. We’re not gonna do anything like you’re just wasting our time and money. So, paul, I’ll prove you wrong. And he came back to me because apparently there’s an overage pensioners demographic on TikTok Shop and they love gardening. So they were happy to spend $200 on a pack of sunflower seeds. And for me I would never do that, but maybe if I’m a retiree nothing to do, yeah, I will spend that. And now they’re doing really well as a result. And again, I thought it would not work, but it does. Yeah, and again I thought it would not work, but it does.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, how many would you say from your clients and other people you know where, within six months, they’re able to get to 25% of their Amazon sales, 50%, 100% or even more. I know there’s some in all those buckets. I know some people who do more on TikTok Shop than on amazon. I know some people who do maybe 10 to 20 percent of it and they’re very happy with that because the profit margins are actually higher. But like, what would you say? The? The breakdown is again, different products have different potential. Uh, on TikTok. So it’s not like we’re trying to say some like blanket number that people say what’s their exact chance, but just roughly, roughly. What would you say?

Paul:

I would say honestly, most brands should be able to get to about 25 to 50% of the sales on Amazon, on TikTok Shop. However, most Amazon brands don’t, because they try to do everything in-house. Don’t because they try to do everything in-house and I say that because people think Amazon sellers, we have an ego and we think, okay, great, we’re crushing it on Amazon, so we know how to crush it on TikTok Shop. It’s a completely different mindset and oftentimes when we take on Amazon clients, we tell them don’t do this, don’t do that. You may think that’s right, but that’s wrong. So that’s the biggest problem, because when they try to do things in-house, they think they know what’s right and they do a disservice to their brand. They waste a lot of time and money as a result.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, all right, we’re going to hop into some deep dive in a couple of minutes about advertising, but first I said we’ll have different contests and promos. I have the first one for you guys, where this is completely free. If you guys already are I think most of you are Helium 10 members already, even if you haven’t started on TikTok Shop yet, but you have a TikTok Shop account I want everybody to connect their token to Helium 10. This is completely free, doesn’t cost anything, but it’ll start to give you access to some of our TikTok tools as you expand with the platform. So, even if you’re on the Platinum plan, there’s not much we have for TikTok Shop. It’s mainly from the Diamond plan. But everybody right now who has a TikTok Shop, go to your sign into Helium 10, go to the right side where your name is and hit connections and then you’ll get to this page, hit connections and then hit add another seller account. Even if you have the platinum plan, you’ll be able to do it. I want everybody to connect their token because that’ll at least give you a free way that you’re going to have your TikTok Shop account connected to Helium 10. You’ll already start getting the profits data if you’ve had sales over seven days, and that’s the first thing I want everybody to do. And then, once you do that, screenshot it and send it to our Instagram account. All right, so we’re going to have different like little paths and like treasure hunts for you guys to do.

Bradley Sutton:

So this one is going to be go to Helium 10 Software I think that’s what it’s called on Instagram Helium 10, Helium 10 Software. Look, look that up, slide into our DM. Show a screenshot of this page with your TikTok Shop token connected. If you already had it connected, still send it. You qualify for it. But if you have not had it connected, connect it now and you’ll be entered for a drawing that we’re going to have for one free month of Helium 10, of whatever plan you have. So that could be $100. That could be $270. You’ll get a free month. A few of you. I’m going to go ahead and say if we get the first 100 people here whether you’re listening to this on the podcast or watching this later the first 100 people who send us a screenshot of their token page showing they have the token connected, we are going to take some of you and give you a free month of Helium 10. So that’s the first thing I want to show you guys.

Bradley Sutton:

The next thing is some of you know we’re talking about Amazon and launching on TikTok Shop. If you’re just curious as to, hey, what would the potential profit be, any of you guys can do this, even with our free Helium 10 Chrome extension. This is a tool we have. It’s called a TikTok profitability calculator. So here I’m just browsing some competitors in the coffin niche and let’s just say this is your product, this is not my product, but let’s just say this was your product. What you can do, everybody you know go to your own product. You don’t have to do it now, this is for later.

Bradley Sutton:

Go to your own product on Amazon and then just hit our Chrome extension profitability calculator and then there’s a tab here that says TikTok Shop. And then on here you can start putting in hey, what would your price be on TikTok Shop? What is your cost of manufacturing and based on, if you’re self-shipping it, if you’re using Fulfilled by TikTok maybe you’re using MCF from Amazon? And then you can put in hey, how much fees are you going to be doing for affiliate, commission and stuff, and you’re going to instantly see the profit margins on TikTok Shop and so, like right away, you might notice wow, wait a minute, the profit margin is a little bit more on TikTok Shop. But if you’re curious, how would your product do with the TikTok Shop fees, because maybe you’re not familiar with it, just go to your listing on Amazon, use the free Helium 10 Chrome extension and go ahead and do that right.

Bradley Sutton:

So that’s the first two tools that we’re going to show you, but now we’re going to skip a little bit and get into a little bit more advanced strategy and something that I haven’t gotten into. Like, we haven’t done too much training on this, but a lot of people know Amazon advertising and what’s involved in it. We’ve been doing it for years. We know that to sell on Amazon, you need to do advertising. Arguably, you should be doing advertising as well on TikTok Shop, but the way that it’s handled is completely different. So Paul now is going to give us a tutorial on ads on TikTok and how they work, and so do you have a screen share you’re going to show on this. Go ahead, take it away.

Paul:

Now, TikTok Shop. The main thing is I want everyone to be aware TikTok Shop you probably heard right now is like Amazon in 2015,. I would agree Because right now, TikTok Shop is in beta, or it feels like it’s in beta because it just doesn’t work. There are issues, there are problems. It’s like Amazon was before FBA, when Amazon was kind of broken. That’s what TikTok Shop is. I love it because it means we can get away with a lot more stuff. So now, first of all, Rankster. I want to explain this because this will explain to you why we’re doing TikTok Shop. Rankster is basically myself and my team. We’ve been selling together since 2013 and we’ve coached hundreds of sellers and brands. We’ve launched two Amazon SaaS tools, two different Amazon agencies and we worked at the top level in aggregator and, like I said earlier, we watched $250 million being wasted.

Paul:

But then I transitioned over to TikTok, which TikTok Shop wasn’t around yet. It was just TikTok. So I transitioned over to TikTok because I was bored of Amazon, because, I won’t lie, I’m not a fan of running PPC campaigns on Amazon. I’m just not a fan because it feels like a race to the bottom. Today is the cheapest day it will be going forward with Amazon ads and that’s the same. So when I transitioned, I started my own TikTok newsletter and it’s great. And since January last year we’ve helped over 70 amazon brands launch on TikTok Shop.

Paul:

But I do that. I’m telling you this because it all means one thing we know Amazon. We know it really well and we’ve been saying since 2013,. So we know Amazon. But this is why you need TikTok Shop. You don’t understand that by being an Amazon seller, you’re leaps and bounds ahead of the rest, especially on TikTok Shop, because TikTok Shop’s great. But I won’t lie if Amazon is higher grade, then TikTok Shop is standard grade. It’s much easier than Amazon. You just have to get around the nuances of TikTok. So that’s why being an Amazon seller actually gives you an advantage on TikTok Shop, because every Amazon seller understands the need for PPC. It’s a pain. It is because PPC is an expense, but it is needed and TikTok’s advertising is catching up to Amazon and that’s a bold statement.

Paul:

But I look at how advertising on TikTok Shop has changed since January last year. I looked at how it is now. Things are improving a lot. But there is one big difference between being an Amazon seller and running ads and TikTok ads that TikTok ads are 10x easier. I cannot say this enough, because the ads are so easy that if you tell me that you are a TikTok ad media buyer, I will laugh at you, because TikTok has made their ad platform so easy that you don’t need a media buyer for TikTok. All you really need to do is focus and spend time on your ads. And when I say spend time, we spend probably about maybe a maximum of an hour per brand per week on their ad console. So look over here.

Paul:

Now this is a screenshot, bear in mind. This is kind of like when you run a PPC ad campaign on Amazon where you make the bid like one cent. This is like that because the ROI here is 16. And this was a launch and works really well. Again, this one over here they spent $2.55, but the ROI is 72. Again, this one over here only spent $2, but the ROI is 24. But then I’ve included this one over here because these other screenshots they more like launches, so you can’t really trust them. But eventually we always get brands to average between four to five x roi um per campaign, and that’s important because right now all our clients, when we run their campaigns, we’re averaging between four to five x roi. That’s not. That’s the norm for TikTok Shop. That’s why I’m showing you this, because these screenshots are cool, but this one is the reality. The reality is 4 to 5x ROI. That will work.

Paul:

Because I want to discuss the features of TikTok ads Now. First of all, you get GMB Max. It’s your lazy but genius ad manager because what it does it’s TikTok’s own ad algorithm. It takes all your content, all your content created for your brand on TikTok, takes all that content and tries to boost it to get the ROI you want. Because when you set up these campaigns, you spend all of 30 seconds making two decisions how much money you want to spend per day and what ROI you want to do per day. That’s the rest. That’s the rest. It looks at all your content and takes your best content and promotes that. It does everything far better than you can. What I’ve done? I run my own ad campaigns alongside these GMB Max ads. And bear in mind, gmb Max ads are the AR driven ads and each and every time I get schooled, these ads just crush my own ads. And I run easily over 500 ad campaigns on TikTok Shop and the GMV Max crushes me absolutely every single time.

Paul:

I hate making that, but it’s true, because with GMV Max you get four things that have been actually released over the past few months. These weren’t around in the very beginning. They’ve only been released recently. First of all, you have ROI protection, and this is crazy. But let’s say you spend $300 per day and on any given day if you do not hit your ROI, TikTok will refund you. That’s huge because TikTok is showing they have so much confidence in their ad algorithm that will refund you if you don’t hit your target. That’s huge. I wish Amazon had that, because next up you have promotional boosts With TikTok Shop. It’s very much promotional driven. So if you have Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas, whichever, you will see a boost in your sales on those given days. So you tell the ad algorithm great, please, boost my campaign on those given days.

Paul:

Automatically decreases your ROI but increases your budget to make sure you make more sales on those given days. All automated. And then you have max delivery. The problem with these GMV Max ads is that let’s say you want to achieve an ROI of five but will only spend your money if it can reach that ROI. So sometimes it just won’t do it. It won’t spend any money. It’s really hard to get it to spend money if it won’t hit that ROI. So max delivery is basically your force. It campaigns to spend money, regardless if it can reach your ROI or not. It uses the ROI more of a guideline, but it will guarantee to spend that money each and every single day. So that’s great for launchers, because the nice thing about TikTok is that it’s a product discovery platform. So the more eyeballs you have looking at your content, the better it is. And now MaxLibery can actually focus on spending money every single day without any delays.

The next thing is creative boost. That’s my favorites. Let’s say, am I in an average account, you could have anywhere between 500 to a thousand videos Now anyway, I’m trying to think now, but basically about 80 to 90 percent of your sales will be driven by a handful of videos. So creative boosts allow you to put a budget behind videos you choose. So all you do now is basically look at your content, say, great, this content is working really well. I’m gonna boost it by about $20 per day or $100 per day, so that way it will spend $20 $200 per day. Whatever amount you decide to make sure it hits your targets. That’s why I look for a boost, because only the best content gets your money, then the main thing with TikTok is our affiliates and ads.

Paul:

If you only focus on affiliates and ads, that’s 80% of the work done. A lot of sellers, what they try to do. They try to make their TikTok Shop amazing, they try to make their listings amazing and all that’s good. But you need affiliates and ads Because your goal will basically be to work with as many affiliates as possible Because you will use their content automatically in your ad campaigns. So the better the affiliate content, the better your ads will perform. That’s a really really good flow chart. So basically sorry, I mean flow wheel Basically, all you need to do is get content that make your ads perform.

Paul:

The better the content, the higher the sales and the higher your sales, the more affiliates will want to work with you. That’s a big deal because bear in mind affiliates when you message an affiliate and ask them to take a sample, promote your product. The biggest problem is the first thing an affiliate does is they look at your product. How many reviews does it have and, most importantly, how many sales does it have? They don’t want to work with brands that have few sales because the likelihood of them making a sale will drop. And also, if affiliates are really good at picking winning products, the algorithm sees that and the algorithm will promote their content. So that’s why a good affiliate is really really fussy and all you need to do really is just feed the algorithm with really good content and boost with ads. One thing to note as well.

Paul:

Affiliates love it when you boost their content with ads, the reason being they get more views, more commission and you get more sales. But affiliates love it when you spend money on the content, because that’s a trust factor For them. They know then that the brand trusts them, so they want to work with the brand again because, basically, they are spending money for them to get more views, more views and commission. So the playbook is really easy. These three steps are all you need to be successful on TikTok. I can’t make it any simpler Basically, work with over 50 affiliates, use their content in your Max GMB campaigns and then do it again, and do it again, and do it again. The main core structure should be work with as many affiliates as possible and then boost their content with those GMV Max ads. And the next step, work with more affiliates and add their content to max campaigns. That’s the core of TikTok Shopping. If you just focus on affiliates and ads, that’s the best formula for success on TikTok Shop. And yeah, that’s about it. Any questions, please let me know.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, perfect, perfect. All right. That was good information about how the ads work. You know we saw some comments that some people are struggling with their ads here and you know, so maybe you’ll be able to give them some help. A lot of good questions coming in, uh the um into the chat. We’re going to try and have time for all of them, a lot of them coming through about. All right, if you have your TikTok account connected, how do you fulfill the orders? Because even before you get to ads and before you get to this like if you don’t have your own warehouse, maybe you’re wondering well, wait a minute, I don’t want I’m not even sure if I qualify for fulfilled by TikTok, and even if I did, I don’t want to just like send 300 units over in this platform. That I’m not sure and I can’t fulfill my own orders. How do I fulfill orders? Well, the answer is through using FBA with multi-channel fulfillment. Then there’s like no risk, there’s no investment in segregating inventory just for TikTok Shop. If you get an order on TikTok Shop, you fulfill it with Amazon. Let me just show you guys you know I think most everybody in here are Helium 10 members. So you guys, if you have a diamond account or higher, you have already full access to this. I’m going to show you where it is, but even before you get there.

Bradley Sutton:

Another question I think not a of people are asking, though, is how do you even get listings on TikTok? And, of course, you can just go to TikTok Shop and do the process, but we have a process where you can have like you have 15 listings on Amazon, within 15 seconds you’ll have it on TikTok Shop. So let me just show you guys really quick those of you who have Helium 10, how to do that, and this might be Paul’s first time seeing some of this in action here, so let’s see, here we go. All right. So what you’re going to want to do is go to the listing converter, and that is up in our main tool window if you have your token connected. So, if you connected TikTok to Helium 10, like I showed you guys in the beginning, the next step is to convert your listing. So you just go to Listing and Listing Converter, and then, basically, all you know you make sure that you know if you have any like batteries in your product or regulations, that you put a yes or no, and then all of your listings in Amazon. If your Amazon account is connected to Helium 10, it’ll show up that you haven’t connected here and then you could just bulk select all of them that you want and then you hit the bulk convert button and literally within less than a minute, you will have your listings now active in TikTok.

Bradley Sutton:

We migrate the images. We’re not copying your listing. We actually use AI, because what makes a good Amazon listing is different than what makes a good TikTok listing Like, for example, there’s no bullet points you know, like you have on Amazon on TikTok, and so we’ll take your bullet points from Amazon, take some of your A-plus content, use AI and translate it to what might make a good title and a good description on TikTok Shop. We import all of your images and then it is set up. Now, once you have that, now we get to that question that you guys had. Well, wait a minute, how do I fulfill my orders? Well, you guys would go to your mapping page inside of Helium 10. And for all of your products that you want your FBA inventory to fulfill, once you go to the mapping page, you just find your Amazon product and then select your Amazon SKU.

Bradley Sutton:

And if you had to use the Helium 10 listing converter. It’s going to be easy, because we take your Amazon SKU and we make that your TikTok SKU, so it’d be super simple. You just say, hey, I want like for example, you guys can see here this a double egg rack. You say, all right, I want to map this TikTok double egg rack to my Amazon double egg rack and I can put like a safety stock here. Because a big thing that you know, like, like something that Paul is talking about, you know is, sometimes products can go absolutely viral on TikTok Shop, sell out, and then what happens if you’re using your Amazon inventory.

Bradley Sutton:

Now what happens? You’re out of stock on Amazon, right? And so some people are like, oh no, I don’t want to get out of stock on Amazon just because it went viral on TikTok safety stock, meaning that if my inventory gets down to 100 on TikTok or on Amazon, I’m sorry, the TikTok listing turns off. So then you still like make sure that you don’t run out on Amazon. And then you select hey, do I want it to be MCF or I’ll just fulfill it myself? And then you can choose which MCF you want the expedited or standard here. So that is something that’s pretty cool. You literally are not even having to touch inventory, touch listings, touch fulfillment, touch shipping. Nothing is manual labor by you. You just connect it using Helium 10 and now you’ve got your listing set up and you’ve got your MCF set up as well so that you can fulfill the order. So that’s like. I hope that answers some of the questions that some were asking.

Paul:

I’ll touch on that tool there. I don’t think anyone’s aware, but that’s such a big deal, I can’t stress that enough. As I mentioned earlier, we’ve had over 70 clients and the number one complaint is their 3PL or service they were using messed up, their shipping and then things their accounts and their violations. The fact that you have that in Helium 10 is going to annoy a lot of service providers. That’s a good thing to do. So, yeah, and like it kind of annoys me because I would actually love that tool, because it could save me. And the worst part about TikTok Shop is that if you lose momentum on TikTok Shop, it’s like a hard reset. So having that tool in place makes a big difference, and it’s not me just saying that that’s a cool tool.

Bradley Sutton:

Thank you Appreciate that. Beth has a question for you. Should I keep GMV Max ads per product or should I let it run with all of our products?

Paul:

All your products, absolutely all your products. The great thing about GMV Max is it will only spend that can reach your ROI. So what we do is reset GMV Max. Per about GMV MAX is it will only spend if it can reach your ROI. So what we do is we set GMV Max per product, so we do a separate campaign per product, and that’s better, because you can’t just do one campaign and add all your products. We’d rather do one product per campaign and then turn it on and off or simply change up the ROI and go from there. Last thing is, if you do one uh, one product per campaign, um, you can make a really, really high ROI to force it not to spend money, because I only spend if I can reach your roi.

Bradley Sutton:

Uh, Bruce says, any strategies for picking the right affiliates?

Paul:

Yes, so first, of all, everyone says, oh, I only want to pick affiliates yes. So first of all, everyone says, oh, I only want to pick affiliates that have a high follower count. A follower count is a vanity metric. It means absolutely nothing. If we look at the top agencies of TikTok Shop, we actually see all their creators and so on and so forth, and although they have some massive creators, they have the best results from creators that have between 10,000 to 20,000 followers.

Bradley Sutton:

So that’s the main thing. So when you pick up affiliates, don’t look at the follower count.

Paul:

Ignore that. Look at what is their GMV Max, how many sales did they do? But bear in mind, if you pick a person that has a high GMV Max, everyone’s going to pick that person. So you might want to pick someone with a low GMV Max and then slowly coach them about making better content. And nice thing is um, new affiliates are more happy to take advice. Where big, bigger affiliates have a big head, they feel that you’re encroaching on their creative flair. So use a mixture of bigger and smaller affiliates and go from there. Also, main thing is don’t be too fussy with affiliates because you don’t know what will work. You really don’t. So go wide as often as possible.

Bradley Sutton:

Along those lines as a good segue to the next Helium 10 tool. Some people were asking about this, and so I said that I would show it. This is also available to all Helium 10 members who have diamond and above the influencer finder. So this is very similar to what you might see inside of TikTok Shop, but it has a little bit more capabilities because it can message. You don’t have the limitations that you do in TikTok Shop about messaging and searching, and so the way you find this guys in Helium 10, and Paul hasn’t checked this out yet, but he’s going to check it out too is go into Marketing and Influencer Finder. We actually have one for Amazon that has all Amazon influencers in there, and then this is the one that has the TikTok influencers. You just hit this dropdown here and then, just exactly what Paul was saying you could filter for GMV, like say, hey, I only want people who have done over 1K or over $100 or over 10K, or maybe they have sold at least 100, or maybe they’ve got the word like, if we’re doing these coffin items, maybe they’ve got the word you know, like, if we’re doing these coffin items, maybe they’ve got the word goth in their content. I want to see all those that come up. I want to see the ones who has average buyer spend or the ones who do Amazon or Amazon TikTok Shop live, or those who have this certain shoppable video engagement rate. There’s a lot of filters here that you can use and then you can see the um. All of the hundreds of thousands of TikTok influencers are all in Helion 10’s database and then, once you have them, you can start saving them and then, like you, can bulk invite them using our influencer messenger.

Bradley Sutton:

So it’s not just about finding the influencer one by one reaching out. I can create something. We have something that creates invites with AI in seconds. I just did one yesterday to send to a whole bunch of people to sell some coffin related things, and it created an invite that was based on the products that I was offering them, and so, basically, I set up a campaign in like two minutes here where I’m like, hey, I’ve got this, you know coffin shelf and this coffin bath mat and something else, and I wanted to give an offer to these and said, hey, it’s going to be 12% that I’m going to offer to you and here’s the products. If you want to, you know, have a free sample and do a video. Just hit yes and everything will go through. And since I already connected this to my Amazon MCF, there’s nothing else I have to do. Now these 15, you know, the ones from these 15 affiliates are going to go ahead and say yes or no and if they hit yes, it automatically creates the order, amazon sends them the label, or the label the product and they’re off to the races.

Bradley Sutton:

Hopefully, when you know, doing videos and this is very different than like reaching out to Amazon influencers, Paul, maybe you can talk about this people can see the rate at which you do videos if they get the samples. And so, like you don’t want to be a deadbeat, you know, like in the Amazon or Instagram world, you send out 10 samples. You know, maybe one or two of them will actually end up making the content, unless there was some kind of monetary thing. But on TikTok, the influencers, they’re incentivized by TikTok to make sure that they do content Right. So, like, what is your rate, would you say? Or like your percentage of when you send out samples where they actually do make content? Is it pretty high?

Paul:

Yeah, so I would say over 90 to close to 100% of the samples. We send out good videos and also, if the affiliate does not create a video, they get dinged by TikTok and it hurts their metrics. So they need to do it. And what’s nice is after they do it you can actually review them and then you can actually only select the affiliates that have a high review them and then you can only select the affiliates that have a high review rating. So that’s why affiliates need to buy card for us. No one will choose them.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep, yep, absolutely, absolutely. So TikTok is a great play. I mean affiliate or creator, I guess they call it. Promoting the product is the backbone of a lot of uh, TikTok Shop sellers, uh, success. Trish says are there discounts on the Diamonds? Uh, let me go ahead and drop a discount code in the comments here. So if you guys want to try the Diamond plan for 25% off for a couple of months, use this coupon code TIKTOKDIA25OFF2. I wonder what that stands for? So this is 25% off two months. Anybody who does not have the Diamond plan. You want to give it a try, at least for two months, just so you can import all your listings, reach out to your first affiliates, connect the MCF and things. It’s definitely worth giving it a try. So TIKTOKDIA25OFF2 use that coupon code for anybody to either go from nothing no helium 10 account to a diamond, or maybe you’ve got a starter plan, you’ve got a platinum plan. You want to try out these TikTok features? Uh, go ahead and use that. So, uh, guys, thank you so much for joining Paul. Thank you for all this information.

Bradley Sutton:

Again, for those who are asking if you want to try out our Helium 10 tools. This is a special discount. Please don’t share it outside of this group and start putting it on Reddit. This is just for you guys who are watching this TikTok DIA. 25 off too. All right, that’ll save you 25% off. So that’s $50 off almost $50 off of the diamond plan for a couple of months. Give it a try. Everybody else, even if you’re on platinum or star, connect your TikTok token, send the screenshot that you did it to our helium 10 software and then follow our helium 10 software page on our Instagram. Send them a DM showing hey, Bradley said that I could be entered into the contest if I showed that I connected my token and we’ll go ahead and pick a winner from there. Paul, if people want to reach out to you and find you on the interwebs, how can they find you out there?

Paul:

The best thing to do is just go to my website rankster.co. We put out lots of content almost every day about TikTok Shop. So, yeah, Sign up there. Any questions, just reply to that. I personally type out every single email and reply. So any questions, just let me know.

Bradley Sutton:

I love it. I love it, Paul. Thank you so much for joining us and thank you, everybody else. Have a great rest of your day.

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