AmpliSell
A weekly breakdown for ecommerce leaders scaling TikTok Shop. The creator systems, benchmarks, and data driving GMV for top brands and client accounts - ready for you to replicate and use. Every Tuesday.
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Hey Reader, Josh here - your TikTok/Amazon expert from AmpliSell. We launched a $22M headphone brand on TikTok Shop with 1 product, 100 samples a month, and $0 ad spend. I was seriously nervous. But I agreed to do it because I knew their team well - we have been growing their Amazon for years. So I said, ok, we'll give it a shot, but I'm not sure we will get much out of TikTok Shop. Turns out I was happily wrong. Five months later, TikTok Shop is profitable and Amazon branded searches for that product are up 588% and sales are up 182%! Crawl, Walk, RunIn mid-March we launched a headphone brand on TikTok. They had never been on TikTok. They have a robust Shopify pipeline and a rapidly growing Amazon channel, which has doubled TWICE in the last 2 years under our management (#humblebrag). But on TikTok they were starting from zero and they were skeptical about it as a channel. They weren't sure the ROI would be there and they didn't want to sink a lot of money into a channel where the long-term economics might not work. Sound like anyone on your leadership team? So the plan was simple: launch small, track the results, scale when the impact is validated. That's where the 1 product, 100 samples a month, and $0 ad spend came from. Months 1 to 3: The FoundationThe first 3 months went to groundwork:
Now we had a channel with steady organic content, a live shop, and products with reviews and social proof. We were getting about 1.5 videos/sample, which is what you can expect for the first couple months while the creator army is built. One thing that surprised our client: because the brand had been around a while, some creators immediately recognized them and were excited to work together. A few L2 and L3 creators came in pretty early. They didn't drive all the revenue, but they definitely helped. If you have an established brand, you may be surprised how many creators recognize you and want in. Months 4 and 5: The JumpThe first couple months did a couple thousand in sales and a couple hundred thousand in impressions. Fine. We validated the process and setup would generate eyeballs and sales. We kept shipping ~100 samples per month. Month 4, impressions jumped. Month 5, they jumped again. By August this one product was pulling 1.4 million impressions a month, 7x where it started in March. Over the first six months, it captured 3.5 million impressions on TikTok! Nothing magic happened. By month 4 there were 300 or 400 videos out there and the more videos you get on platform, the more eyeballs you capture. More product in more creators' hands, more videos, more people seeing the product. The question is "does this translate into revenue on TikTok and other channels?" First, TikTok GMVYes. TikTok Shop sales for this product went from $2.6K in March to $7.4K in July to $18K in August. September will easily double again because we increased sampling and the creator community is established - the engine is built and running. We saw a 7x increase in GMV in five months on 100 samples a month and no ads until month 4. Profitable by August! Let's Take a Look at the Amazon HaloWe also run this brand's Amazon channel, so we can see what TikTok did to Amazon. Those 729 videos over the first 5 months and 3.5 million impressions lined up with a 588% increase in branded searches for that exact product on Amazon. Brand name plus product name, up 588%! When I plotted brand-plus-product search, e.g. "Ridge Wallet" on top of TikTok impressions, I found a 0.95 correlation. More eyeballs on TikTok tracked directly with more people searching for this product on Amazon. Now you might say, "Well Josh, maybe the whole brand just got more popular over that time." Great question. I asked it too. So I pulled a similar product from the same brand that we did NOT launch on TikTok. Its branded searches rose just 18% over the same period. Same brand. Similar products. No changes to ad spend. One product went on TikTok and its branded search grew 588%. The other stayed off TikTok and its branded search grew just 18%. Over the same period, Amazon sales for the product were up 182%! And because TikTok was driving branded search to Amazon and those searches were converting, branded search conversion rate went way up. That's a positive ranking signal on Amazon. So TikTok was selling product directly AND improving the product's Amazon ranking. How incredible is that? Icing on the cake: the Shopify channel added roughly $1,000/mo in sales. Through TikTok's Shopify pixel we can attribute an extra $4,000 over the last 4 to 5 months. Small dollar amount, but it's early days and we can verify the halo shows up on DTC as well. The Math Behind the LaunchWhat this took:
And this is just the beginning of a very conservative start. TikTok revenue jumped in month 4, jumped again in month 5, and the channel is now profitable on its own. TikTok is profitable as a standalone channel and counting the extra demand captured on Amazon, it's more profitable still - not by a ton of money, but for a demand gen channel this is top tier! If your leadership wants proof firstThis is what a conservative TikTok launch looks like: small sample budget, no ad spend until the content base exists, and measurable lift on and off TikTok inside 5 months. If you want the same recipe for your brand, including how we got a skeptical leadership team on board, talk to me. I will show you exactly how we'd do it for you. We help ecommerce leaders who don't have the time and team to scale TikTok Shop.
We plan, execute, and deliver TikTok growth.Book a call here -> https://calendar.app.google/SjUfGyLrPdH9g7fS9 |
AmpliSell
A weekly breakdown for ecommerce leaders scaling TikTok Shop. The creator systems, benchmarks, and data driving GMV for top brands and client accounts - ready for you to replicate and use. Every Tuesday.