How To Use TikTok Shop As An Amazon Seller

Welcome back to the Amazon Blueprint podcast. TikTok shop is going to be bigger than Amazon. Just kidding, guys. I cannot predict the future. However, TikTok shop has a huge upward trajectory and momentum. I want to break down TikTok shop. What is it? How you can get on it? How you can leverage it, especially if you’re an Amazon seller? Let me give you some context. Tiktok shop launched in September of last year. They made $14 billion in revenue. Amazon in their first year did 500K, and it took them five years hit $1 billion. Tiktok Shop reached $14 billion from September until the end of the year. Here’s the crazy thing about TikTok Shop is they had a massive social media platform. Everyone’s on TikTok Shop and everyone’s addicted to scrolling. What they did is they created a marketplace, and they combined something that you’re already on, social platform, with a marketplace, and they made it so easy for you to shop because all you have to do is keep scrolling and you see products in the videos, and you see someone using a product. You click on the product, it takes you to the shop. Right there in shop, you click the button, click buy, and you can buy with Apple Pay, with Google Pay.

They make it super easy, super simple. Even my wife has bought stuff on TikTok shop, and she rarely ever shops on anything other than Amazon. I mean, clearly, guys, you can see that this is a very, very, very good way to sell products because it looks super natural. This is just the creator. She’s creating content. She’s showcasing different products. The thing is, it doesn’t feel salesy. It feels like she’s just showing people. She’s like, Hey, look at my lips with nothing. Look at my lips with this thing. It just so happens that the product is linked. You’ll see that little bar, right? It says shop on it. You can click on it and it’ll open up the product. Then you can, right then and there, click on it and buy it. This coconut oil sold 1.3 million units, and I’ve never, I’ve never heard of this brand. That’s $19.2 million based on how much it’s selling for. That’s insane. I’ve never heard of this brand. This is the power of TikTok shop. It’s because you have content that you don’t even need to have a lot of followers. This content can go viral. You can be someone with 2,000 followers, 1,000 followers, 10,000 followers, make a piece of content, and if you’re consistent, one of it will blow up, it’ll go viral.

Thousands or millions of people can see it, and look at how many sales that you can make. Here’s the cool thing, is that brands incentivize content creators to make content by giving them a commission on the sales. These content creators, every single time someone buys from the link that’s in their video, which, by the way, you don’t have to create any custom codes or anything like that. They have an agreement with you. They make a video, they put the product, and if anyone buys from that link, they make a commission. That’s simple. Guys, the biggest thing about this app is it’s made for Gen Z. They’re literally addicted to scrolling. Everyone’s on there. Everyone’s always scrolling. There’s a lot of purchasing power on there, even though they might not have as much money as millennials or baby boomers or whatever, but there’s just so much more of them, and they are the growing generation. As Gen Zs start working and get into the corporate world and grow up and stuff, they’re all on this platform. They’re not on Facebook, they’re not on Instagram that much. They’re all on TikTok. Right now, they’re the number one consumer in the entire world.

Let me walk you through how to set up your TikTok shop. First of all, you go to seller-us. Tiktokshop. It’s super easy, and all you have to do is follow the instructions to set up your TikTok shop. Make sure to get the pro account so you have access to all the features that you need to set up your TikTok shop correctly. Then from there, you can actually connect your TikTok shop account to your Amazon Seller Central. I know I didn’t think that was going to be possible because I thought they were competing, but they’re not. They’re actually connected. What you can do from there is merge all of your inventory inventory from your Amazon Seller Central onto TikTok shop. So literally, all I had to do is click one button and it copied over all of my listings. You can also create it manually if you want. And so from there, you now have a TikTok shop account. You have products on there. You can use a software like Weeby to connect your TikTok shop to Amazon. Number one, it will track the inventory. So whatever inventory you have on Amazon, it will show in TikTok shop.

Number two, anytime someone buys a product on TikTok shop, it’ll send the order to Amazon. Amazon will fulfill and then it will send the tracking information back to TikTok shop. So whoever bought it can see where the product is at all times. Now, once you have the TikTok shop account set up, you have your inventory already there, all you have to do is create some content, put it on your TikTok store so people see that you’re actually a legitimate company. Here’s the thing. I thought, I don’t want to create content. I’m not great at creating content. Here’s the deal. You can actually get creators to make the content for you. You do not need to create any content. What you can do is you can go and find creators. There’s actually a section in TikTok shop where you can find creators. Then from there, it’ll give you a list of all the creators on the platform. You can create filters. You can say, Okay, people who have an average of 10,000 views, who’ve earned at least $10,000, who are male or female, who are this age or that age, this category, that category. Then you can have that refined list.

From there, you can just message them directly. There’s two things that you can do. Number one, you can message them. You can message them, send a message, Hey, how’s it going? I’d love to offer you a free product. I also pay you $50 if you create some content for me. They’ll create some content for you. You can take that content, put it on your TikTok shop. The other thing is you can do a collaboration. You can do an open collaboration, which means you say anyone who wants to become an affiliate can. They can go in, and let’s say you give them a 20% commission. Any creator can come in and become an affiliate and get 20% commission on anything that they sell. Or you can do a targeted collaboration where you can basically go in. Let’s say you have a bunch of saved creators, like from that list that you made. You can message them all in one group and say, Hey, Hey, I love your content. I would love to make you a special offer. All regular affiliates or influencers get 20%. I’m going to give you 40% commission and a free product if you’re willing to try my product, if you’re willing to create content about it.

And the beautiful thing is if it happens through the TikTok shop platform, TikTok shop will constantly remind them to make content. I love it because they’re actually doing some of the work for you. They’re saying, Hey, come on, you got a free sample. You have to upload a video, and all that stuff. Tiktok shop pays attention to creators who get free samples and don’t create any content. If they don’t, they’ll penalize them and they’ll say, Listen, you’re not a good creator. We’re not going to allow you to collaborate with brands. They’re actually policing it and they’re making it very good for brands, not just for the affiliates. All right, so let me recap. What you’re going to do is go into TikTok shop, click on Creators, Click Find Creators. You’re going to see a list of creators, videos that they’ve made. You can add filters. Filter by what you think I like to do average 10K views, average person made at least $1,000 in sales, more sometimes. I’ll filter by the category, and this way I can go in and look at the videos that they’ve done make sure that they’ve made videos similar to what I want them to make.

Then I like to do one of two things. Number one, I’ll message them, so I’ll send them a personal message. Then number two, I’ll also invite them to a collaboration so that they can get an invitation and say, Hey, this brand, MMA Nutrition, wants to collaborate with you. They want to offer you 40% commission. I’m hitting them from both sides, so they definitely get the message. I’m trying to get as many people as possible to become affiliates to create content for me. Yes, I’m giving them away free products, but think about it, guys. My product, cost of goods and fulfillment all that stuff is probably 10 to $12. If I get a hundred of them every single month, that’s $1,200 a month. We’re spending thousands and thousands of dollars on PBC on Amazon every single month, and their fees are way higher. Let’s get into the fees. Amazon’s fees are typically around 30 to 33%. 15% of that is commission, and the other 15% is the fulfillment fee. That 15% fulfillment fee is going to stay the same because Amazon is still fulfilling your product. But that 15% commission that Amazon takes for allowing you to sell on their platform, TikTok Shop’s commission is only 2% plus 30 cents per unit.

However, take advantage of this now because they’re saying that their fees are going to go up to 8% on July first of 2024. It’s still going to be 7% better than Amazon, but it is a significant increase from the 2%. While we’re on the topic of fees, one more thing to take into consideration, the commission for influencers. The way that you want to think about it is you are paying the influencers a commission for them creating content and making people see your product. They’re basically marketing for you. If you think about it, if a creator makes a piece of content that gets 20,000 views and gets 10 sales, you’re going to pay them commission, let’s say 40% on those 20 sales. However, all of those people still saw your product, so that creates branding. Now, here’s the beautiful thing that we’re noticing. As we’re paying all of these affiliates and we’re getting all of these videos, we’re seeing a halo effect on Amazon. We’re seeing branded search on Amazon significantly increase. Our organic rank is going up because of all of that external traffic coming in from TikTok into Amazon, people typing in the brand name.

It’s really helping the brand on Amazon make way more sales profitably versus just on TikTok shop. It’s a win-win because number one, you’re making sales on TikTok shop with the affiliate, especially if you have a consumer product, they’re coming back and they’re buying again and again. You don’t have to pay commission on those repurchases. You’re getting all of this marketing and technically free content, you’re only paying for the commission. On top of that, all of that brand awareness and marketing is translating into searches on Amazon for your brand, making you even more money. It’s up to you how much commission you want to give the influencer. You can do 5%, 10%, 15%, 50%, 100%. It’s completely up to you. I personally go up to 40%. I push the limit on how much I can because I want those affiliates to be the most excited about my product because they’re getting the most amount of commission from my product versus any other product. It’s very attractive for them and it incentivizes them to make videos for me. Here’s the beautiful thing. You can work with unlimited creators. You can actually message, I think, a thousand creators a day with no restriction.

All right, guys, hopefully this is insightful and you have a much better understanding of TikTok Shop and you have a little bit more confidence on how to take advantage. Get in now because TikTok Shop is in the Wild West phase like Amazon was 10 years ago. You want to take advantage of the momentum. I think it’s going to be huge. The way that they’re going with the amount of people on their platform, it’s definitely going to be a huge marketplace.