Guide to Using TikTok Shop

In the United States, TikTok boasts a massive user base of over 150 million individuals who turn to the platform for entertainment and inspiration provided by their favourite content creators. Whether it's the latest trends, fashion and beauty advice, culinary recipes and more, TikTok is a hub for discovering engaging content. Excitingly, we're thrilled to announce the full-fledged introduction of TikTok Shop in the US and, more recently, in the UK.

With community-driven trends like #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt inspiring people to discover and share the products they love, TikTok is creating a new shopping culture and sending products like Lion Latches flying off of shelves. TikTok Shop will now bring shoppable videos and LIVE streams directly to For You feeds across the country - and give brands, merchants, and creators the tools to sell directly through shoppable content on the TikTok app.

TikTok Shop serves as a dynamic platform that enables brands and creators to connect with a highly-engaged customer base, all driven by their shared interests. It skillfully combines the strengths of community, creativity, and commerce to deliver an unparalleled shopping experience.

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TikTok is now also offering merchants the ability to connect natively with their favourite ecommerce platforms, like Shopify, via the TikTok for Shopify App. However, it also connects with other big ecommerce platforms, like WooCommerce, BigCommerce and Magento.

Keep in mind that this doesn't stop you from integrating your shopping experience from discovery to checkout from within the TikTok app itself, giving any creator or affiliate the ability to promote your products directly through the use of their short form content or livestream and receive the commissions for their efforts.

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However, keep in mind that there are definitely prerequisites in order to gain access to the TikTok Shop and this can make or break your current chances.

You will require a US or UK TikTok account setup (accounts outside of these areas will not be accepted)

Access to reliable shipping suppliers (must either hold inventory in the locations mentioned above, or have a solid China supplier with USPS last mile tracking)

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Maintain excellent customer service with customers who purchase products. This incentivises more creators to advertise your products and consumers to continue using the ecommerce platform.

Failure to comply with the above will quickly get your account either restricted or banned due to creating an unpleasant experience in your TikTok Shop access which builds negativity on the platform usage which is unfavourable in your case.

As an example of what you might be sleeping on, this one creator who filmed a short form video highlighting a portable monitor, went on to generate $600k in sales from a single short form video.

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Keep reading for the top 34 observations about TikTok Shop from my friend Nick:

Written by https://twitter.com/nickkkft

1. The best way I can describe TikTok Shop is a marketplace where you can basically get to use one of the biggest sites in the world as your storefront without needing a product page, without needing payment processors, and getting a built in affiliate marketing program.

2. You can create an account for TikTok Shop here. You will have to link it to a TikTok account, just use a brand new one for your shop. This is only available in US, UK and some countries in Asia for now.

3. It’s pretty straightforward, the interface that is.

4. The Growth tab has the applications which you can integrate with TikTok shop. You can use print on demand applications and apps that link to Shopify to sync products.

5. You can generate sales by posting videos and tagging your TikTok Shop.

6. You can generate sales by sending your product to TikTok Shop creators and make a video with your product.

7. You can generate sales by asking your TikTok Shop creators to just make some random video but tag your product.

8. You can generate sales by running TikTok Shop ads.

9. You can have creators promote your product without sending them the product itself, they can just talk about the product in the video.

10. It’s basically influencer marketing on steroids.

11. Keep the creators happy, treat them the best you possibly can. They are promoting for you for free and you’re getting the best deals as an ecommerce owner.

12. TikTok Shop is probably the most insane/absurd opportunity in 2023.

13. For the first time you can actually have orders stack up in a positive flywheel. Let me explain: if you get 10,000 orders, you will probably have 500 of those orders tagging you in a review, leading to more sales, kind of like an infinite loop.

14. Funny, in Facebook Ads or other ad platforms, you could spend $50K to make back $50K and lose money on product cost. With TikTok, you can spend $50k to make back $50k, but that will mean you’ll sell a bunch of units, which will probably lead to a lot of people reviewing/promoting your product and leading to profit in the long run.

15. As of October, TikTok is giving 50 to 90% discount codes to buyers, so an item you sell for $50 could be bought for $5, but you still get paid the full $50. Kinda funny.

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16. One of the drawbacks of TikTok Shop, for beginners especially, is the payout times. You will get paid out, like in 3 days, after 15 days, after you deliver the product. So delivery time + 15 days + 1-3 days for transit time for the wire to arrive. This is because there’s no Stripe or PayPal involved, TikTok is mediating the website.

17. This time can be reduced as you get more orders, but for the first 50 you have to wait the month.

18. An easy solution for this is credit, have high margins on your products.

19. TikTok Shop ads are absurdly cheap, they are the best ads to be running in 2023, and they will not be cheap in a year or two years.

20. You CAN dropship from China, you just need to tell your supplier to use USA tracking. China tracking will not work.21. Make sure that you update tracking numbers within 3 days or max 7 days (avoid 7, bad for your account).

22. Make sure your product that you pick is easy to make videos with, so visually appealing, and has a good margin. You should be able to sell it for at least 4-5 times what you buy it for, or minimum 3x.

23. I recommend testing some products with dropshipping, and then once you find some product-market or product-channel fit (basically means when your product is proven to sell) you can start ordering bulk products.

24. If you want access to my private supplier that’s processed $50M+ in orders, you can DM me on discord nikku.eth after you’ve joined my discord. The private supplier also helped me handle $1M days so he knows what he’s doing. He’ll source you any product at a good price, and he can also do the US tracking on your orders which will let you dropship on TikTok Shop.

25. There’s 4 objectives currently you can optimize for: gross revenue, purchases, clicks and checkouts. I’m testing all of these, but so far I’ve got the best results with gross revenue (which is the default option, TikTok trying to get you the most revenue possible).

26. Avoid setting any bid caps at this stage, because you don’t know your numbers. You’ll just end up limiting your ad spend and it won’t spend enough.

27. The main thing I’d recommend would be to spend time researching products, adding them to TikTok, researching for creators, and running paid ads. All these are high impact tasks for your business.

28. Like all platforms, your product will matter the most. Even though, right now, it’s absurdly cheap and you might be able to get away by selling anything and making profit, it’s not a good long term strategy. Get in the habit of releasing new and improved products.

29. People can also promote your product on a livestream, although I haven’t seen a lot of people doing this yet, but that’s just me. It could be explored.

30. If you’ll be running ads on TikTok Shop, use this link to create an ad account. You’ll get a free $1500 ad credit. (This is only valid for 3 months, so don’t miss it)

31. A showcase is, well, a showcase of your products. A creator can add your product to their showcase and people can buy it there.

32. You can set commissions on each product for creators. So if you put a 15% commission, the creator will get auto-paid 15% of your product price.

33. End game can look like spending hundreds of thousands on ads, plus having a massive affiliate list of people promoting the brand, and getting to a point where tons of customers are also posting reviews about your brand and you just absolutely explode. This platform will build billion dollar brands.

34. Be careful of the cashflow intensity. You’ll absolutely need cashflow from somewhere else or credit to scale fast. Even if you have creators making video for you, you’ll be getting delayed payouts, so don’t scale too fast unless you can come up with the cash to front the orders. This is also why you need higher margins.