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. The GMV you see today comes from actions you took 8 weeks ago. To drive GMV on TikTok, you:
That process takes 4 - 8 weeks. And every step can be tracked by a KPI. Which means you can predict when GMV will go up or down and fix it ahead of time. The 5 KPIs that drive GMV
Creator Outreach VolumeCreator outreach works a lot like B2B cold email. You have been on the receiving end of plenty of it, so here's why it works and why it's just like creator outreach. The math on cold email: for every 100,000 emails sent, just 1% of people reply. Of those replies, only a few are positive and book a call. You can send hundreds of thousands of emails and book just 20 calls. Creator outreach runs on similar math. Great creators get hammered every day by brands that want to work with them. Most of those brands are small or unknown, but they still clog the inbox and make it harder for you to be seen. Here’s what the creator outreach funnel looks like. You reach out to 20,000 creators. About 2,000 reply and ask for a sample. You approve fewer than half. Around 500 samples ship. So your outreach volume has to be high and automated. And you need to be doing 1 to 1 personalized outreach. 1 to 1 gets better reply rates, so it raises the yield, but it doesn’t replace the volume. At AmpliSell, our shortcut is a creator community we already built, full of creators ready to promote your brand. If your outreach is low, everything downstream is low: fewer creators say yes, fewer samples ship, fewer videos get made, and less GMV shows up on TikTok, with less halo on Amazon and DTC. This is your earliest warning light. It takes weeks to pick, pack, ship, deliver, unbox a sample, and record a video. If outreach is low this week, you’ll feel it in GMV about 8 weeks from now. Samples ShippedSamples shipped is a proxy for 1 thing: how many creators are willing to work with your brand. Why does that number need to be big? Because creator performance varies wildly, even among proven creators. Jordyn Gunderson is a Comfrt creator with 161k followers on TikTok. She posts 6 to 10 videos every day, of just one product, with different hooks, angles, and styles. About 80% of those videos never get past a few thousand views. The other 20% catch some lift, 25,000 to 50,000 views. A much smaller slice hits a million or more views. And she sells well over $1 million of Comfrt a year and, as she has shared, earns her six figures in commissions! That’s one of the best creators on the platform and 80% of her videos don't get traction. So you need a wide range of creators posting a lot of videos to give the algorithm enough shots at picking you up. 10 samples a week doesn’t get you there. The lowest bound of success we’ve seen for clients is 25 to 50 samples per week, and at that level you’re looking at five figures in monthly GMV. To move into six figures, you need to be sampling at least 500 units a month. Videos PostedEarly on, this number is going to look rough. These are new creators, or at least new to your brand, and a lot of them are free-sample hunters. That’s fine. It’s the cost of casting a wide net. You are hunting for the creators who post consistently and do well, so you can become best friends with them and give them all your love. You reached out to a ton of creators, you shipped a pile of samples, and now you need videos out of them. Videos are a leading indicator because videos are how people find, discover, and buy products on TikTok. Organic videos on your own brand page don’t drive much GMV. People on TikTok are there to be entertained first. They can be sold to, but they’re not in a shopping mindset. Creators do the selling, because creators are people. Your shopper already follows them. Trust is already built. People want to be like them, so when a creator posts about a headphone or a jacket, the shopper wants that headphone and that jacket. Videos lead to eyeballs and eyeballs lead to GMV. Under 100 videos a month, you won’t crack five figures in monthly GMV. To crack six figures, you need over 1,000 videos a month. That count includes every post, so proven creators posting weekly do most of the lifting. Of the samples you ship, only some turn into a video. When you’re starting out, expect a post rate of 30% to 50%, depending on how rigorous you were in picking creators. As you get better at selection and build a creator community, that climbs to 70% to 90%. Post rate tells you who showed up. The bigger number is how many videos you get out of each creator. That’s next. Those floors move as your creator community grows. You’ll get more videos, and better ones, out of the same creators. If you launched recently or are launching in 2027, treat these as the floor you use to guide the conversation with leadership. And give it time. The sample has to arrive, get unboxed, and get recorded. Set aside your own time to nudge creators to post. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Videos Posted per Proven CreatorThis is the one to watch. Let's start with what “proven” means. As we define it, a proven creator has generated over $1,000 in GMV in the last month and posts at least several times a week. That tells you 2 things. They’re active, which the algorithm rewards. And they know how to post videos that sell. Not every proven creator will want to work with you, especially if you just launched and there aren’t many of them yet. Don’t be discouraged. This is simply the cohort you go after hardest. Here’s something most people won’t tell you. 200,000+ brands are trying to sell on TikTok Shop. Only 8,000 creators have ever sold more than $25,000 in GMV. The scales are tipped heavily toward the creators. TikTok Shop keeps growing and more brands launch every day. PS - The fastest path to more proven creators is to make them: give creators feedback on their videos, show them what’s working, and get other proven creators to share how they do it. We run a coaching system for exactly this inside our community. You can build one yourself. But don't stress about it, if it was easy there would be no reward. Now let's get back to why we need video volume from proven creators. Remember Jordan’s 80/20. Even a proven creator needs volume to hit. For a given sample, a proven creator should post 3 to 8 videos on average. Build a relationship with them and that can become 15, 20, 25, or more. Watch every video that comes out and count how many you get per creator. More is almost always better because even unproven creators can drive GMV and can go viral. But if you want a true north star, track videos per proven creator per month, and make that one number go up. GMV Max Ad SpendGMV Max takes the pool of videos already made for your brand (by creators, your own store page, and a few other spots on TikTok) and shows them to more people. That’s it. It amplifies what exists. So if you don’t have videos, don’t run GMV Max. There’s nothing for it to push. We usually tell clients to wait until they have about 100 videos before turning it on. Once the videos are there, GMV Max spend is a strong leading indicator of GMV. It finds the videos that are already selling and puts them in front of more shoppers, and sales follow. Where everyone trips is the ROI number. GMV Max ROI is an efficiency ratio, like TACoS on Amazon or MER: total ad spend against total sales, including sales the ads didn’t directly touch. Expect a GMV Max ROAS around 1 in the early days, climbing to 2 or 3 over time. With a few exceptions, we don’t see 6, 7, or 8. That makes sense when you remember what TikTok is. This is demand creation. The people watching are there to be entertained. They discover your brand, and then some of them buy. Capturing demand is what your Amazon listing and your site are for. What This Looks Like in PracticeBecause we track videos per proven creator every month, one of our account managers noticed one a brand’s top creators had stopped posting. They reached out, re-engaged him, and got him posting again. It took some negotiation on commission, encouragement, and training, but the relationship survived. He kept posting, and he kept driving GMV. This matters more than it sounds. The bulk of your sales will come from a small share of your creators. Lose a proven creator and your GMV takes a real hit. Without that one number on the dashboard, nobody would have noticed until the GMV report six weeks later. Your Leadership ScoreboardBuild leadership a scoreboard and use it to set expectations. GMV goes on it, obviously. Just don’t let leadership fixate on it. TikTok is a demand creation channel, so GMV is only one of three ways it pays you back. Track all 3 with leadership:
PS - Amazon halo can be tracked. I am showing how this Thursday at the TikTok Shop Operators Summit. Save your spot HERE. DTC can be tracked partially with the TikTok pixel. In-store requires an incrementality study, but we’ve seen the data from plenty of brands that have done it, and it’s positive. Under those three, put the 5 leading KPIs from this issue:
If any of the five dips, you know what to fix, and you know it before the three success numbers move! We help ecommerce leaders launch and scale TikTok Shop.
We plan, execute, and deliver TikTok growth.Book a call with me 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.