TikTok Shop right now is bigger than Amazon or Shopify was from launch. That is what TikTok Shop is right now." Bold statement? Maybe. But Jordan West, founder and CEO of Social Commerce Club, has the data to back it up. With CPMs dropping 26% last year while ad spend increases, and creators with under 10K followers generating $250K in monthly sales, we're witnessing the early stages of what could be the biggest disruption in e-commerce since Amazon itself. In this explosive episode, Jordan breaks down his exact three-phase playbook for scaling from zero to $100K per month on TikTok Shop, reveals why big brands like Estée Lauder are struggling to adapt, and shares the underground strategies that are creating millionaire creators overnight.

—

Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!

—

‍

Chapters: 

(00:00) Introducting Jordan West

(05:18) The Exponential Growth of TikTok Shops

(10:48) Understanding the TikTok Shops Ecosystem

(14:12) The Power of Social Search

(16:16) Understanding Social Commerce

(19:34) Misconceptions about TikTok Shops

(24:33) The 80/20 Rule for Viral Content

(26:16) Best Practices

(31:36) Making It From Zero to Viral

(33:20) The Tiktok Shop Playbook: Phase One

(38:18) The Tiktok Shop Playbook: Phase Two

(42:44) The Tiktok Shop Playbook: Phase Three

(46:21) Exploring YouTube’s Potential in Social Commerce

—

Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

Relevant Links:

• Jordan’s LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/jordan-west-marketer

‍

Transcript

Jordan West:

TikTok shop right now is bigger. The exponential curve that we see right now is bigger than Amazon or Shopify was from launch.

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we've got a returning guest. We've got a long time friend on the pod, and we're talking about one of the hottest of hot topics TikTok shops. What do you need to know? What are some misconceptions? What's the growth playbook? And we're going to zoom out beyond that as well and look at social commerce as a whole. What's YouTube up to and what's going to happen in this space? And so my guest is Jordan West. He's the founder and CEO of Social Commerce Club. He's also the host of a fabulous podcast, scaling your E-Commerce brand. And so we're going to get into it, but with that, Jordan, welcome to the show and how's it going, man?

Jordan West:

Brett, so nice to be on here. Last time you and I met a couple months ago, you came on my podcast. It was good. It was actually very, very well received. I looked at the download numbers and I was like, oh, people really like brand. They like YouTube. People like talking about this kind of stuff. Yeah,

Brett Curry:

Yeah.

Jordan West:

I should put some money behind that one. So secrets to Scaling your e-Commerce brand. We've been around, it's like 650 episodes now.

Brett Curry:

Whoa.

Jordan West:

I'll tell you, if there's one thing that I am good at, it is finding something and then just doubling down, doubling down, doubling down, which is why TikTok, TikTok Shop, I am telling you I haven't been this excited about something in a long, long time

Brett Curry:

And with good reason, there's merit behind it. We're going to talk about the data. We're going to talk about the case studies. We're going to talk about the stories that'll motivate you to go hard into TikTok shops. But first, I got to hit the pause button. 650 episodes, is that what you said? 600 episodes?

Jordan West:

Yes, yes, yes. Holy, how so? There's a couple of things that I do every single week I take, and just so you know, it's very, very selfish. I just take all of the different things that I'm learning in our different businesses. And all I do is I consolidate the learning in a podcast. And in LinkedIn, if you guys follow me on LinkedIn, I'll post multiple times a day and it's just selfish, everyone, just so you know. I'm just taking what I'm learning and then putting it out there. That's the only reason that I do this. And then it just happens to help people. And I kind of forget when I'm on this side. I forget that there's, for us, it's like we're in the thousands of downloads per episode. I'm like, oh yeah, that's right. I was at Shop Talk recently and you, I'm walking down and people like, Jordan, I listen to your podcast all the time. I watch your podcast. I'm like, oh yeah, I forget. I do it. Honestly, I just forget that I do it because it's just a matter of consolidating all the learning that I have. That's why I do it.

Brett Curry:

Such a great way to look at it. What do you want to learn? What do you want to add to your business? What expert do you need to get to know? Do a podcast on that. And now you're creating media that your marketplace is going to enjoy. It's going to attract people into your network and your learning, and you can share the learnings with your team. And same with LinkedIn. I love that approach. Super, super smart. And yeah, quick funny story that's related. So we're about 300 episodes in on e-commerce evolution. I'm not as prolific as Jordan West. Now you set the bar up here. I got to see what I can do to up my game. Maybe there's been a few times where this is a grind. It's also a grind to do a podcast when you're running a company and hiring people and running marketing and all this stuff. And so there's been one time in particular where I was like, I got to quit the podcast. It's just too much of a grind, too much of a hassle. I go to a trade show and three or four people stop me and say, I love the podcast, man. Keep up the good work. It's so good. And I'm like, oh, okay. No, this is part of why I do it. And so I've been doing it ever since. And

Jordan West:

I also have to say, so last week I had Curtis Matz on my podcast. Curtis is the founder and CEO at Portland Leather Goods big company. Awesome.

Brett Curry:

I met him in Austin just a couple weeks ago. Great guy.

Jordan West:

Yeah, Curtis is awesome. So I had him on when they were little too, and he came back on and they were going to do two or 300 million this year. Pretty good company. But

Brett Curry:

Think maybe pushing four, I think I heard pushing four. But either way insane

Jordan West:

To me, once you're over a couple hundred million, I mean, what's another a hundred? Here's the thing that Curtis and I talked about that I think is really interesting for everybody who's listening to this, especially if you're a brand owner. Curtis has been absolutely grinding at building a personal brand this year.

Brett Curry:

And

Jordan West:

I asked him, I said, what's the number one reason you do it? And he said people. He said, the reason why I'm doing this is for the people and the kind of people that come in when I post on LinkedIn and I say, Hey, I've got an open position. A players that come through are just phenomenal. And yes, I have to S through, but those people that are the learners, that's who I'm always going for. I'm like, if you are listening to all of this new stuff, you're probably my kind of people.

Brett Curry:

Totally. It's a great call out. Great call out. Okay, awesome. So now everyone's motivated to start their own podcast or it is a grind, but we love it and we do endorse it. So with that, let's dive into TikTok shops. And so Jordan Dazzle us. Wow us, motivate us. Why should we consider TikTok shops? What are you seeing with your agency clients and the brands you're investing in? What's going on with TikTok shops right now?

Jordan West:

Alright, here's your soundbite. Brett TikTok shop right now is bigger. The exponential curve that we see right now is bigger than Amazon or Shopify was from launch. Wow. That is what TikTok shop is right now. People will make fun of it on some of the bigger brands will make fun of it. So from a

Brett Curry:

Wait, unpack that a little bit or define that a little bit. So TikTok Shops is bigger now than Amazon was after launch, or what do you mean specifically?

Jordan West:

Exactly. So it is bigger than Amazon or Shopify was when they launched, and it's not even close the exponential curve. None of us understand what an exponential curve looks like. It's really difficult for us to wrap our brains around. All we know is we see it afterwards and we know we're like, oh, that's what exponential growth is, right? AI is one of those things right now that we're like, everyone's like, oh yeah, I was sitting in my backyard of a different house that I have, and I was sitting back there with my brother-in-law and we have to redo the roof, right? Oh, great, we have to redo the roof. I'm like, I'll bet you in three years that there's going to be a robot that goes and does that. And he's like, oh, no way. No way. I'm like, then you don't understand an exponential curve because if you look today, oh three PRO is released. It is scary, intelligent, what oh three Pro does, and again, we're at the bottom of an exponential curve, the same thing right now with TikTok shop. So when you see that curve starting to rise and you understand what that looks like for people who are not watching it, is this exponential hockey when we understand that we're at the bottom of it on TikTok shopping,

Brett Curry:

Social commerce. So you think we're about to hit that inflection point

Jordan West:

Right now? Absolutely. I don't even think we're even close to it on TikTok shop. I don't think that people are getting trained right now how to purchase, right? They're getting trained how to socially purchase. We've done it for a while with Facebook, but we haven't really Facebook and sorry, meta never really cracked the code on Social

Brett Curry:

Promise, right? They tried a few years ago social shopping, and I think Zuck was just ahead of his time a little bit there that it looked promising, it made sense, it didn't work. But TikTok shops has kind cracked the code. Now, I want to clarify a little bit. So you think we're just getting started with TikTok shops, is that because, I mean, it's huge. So the number of users was hundred 30 million users in the US or whatever the users are there.

Jordan West:

It's 180 million are on there for 60 minutes or more a day.

Brett Curry:

Holy cow. That's insanity. So are you saying it's really just beginning to explode though TikTok shops because people are still not buying mass on TikTok shops. So of that 180 million, there's only a smaller percentage that are actually buying. And so there's all that upside there.

Jordan West:

Yes. Because the trust factor is not there yet. And also the affiliates aren't quite there yet either. So I will tell you a leading indicator that tells me that this is the biggest opportunity ever. CPMs dropped last year by 26% on TikTok.

Brett Curry:

No way.

Jordan West:

So what does that tell you? To me, that doesn't tell me that that's a demand issue with advertising because advertising dollars have only gone up. What it tells me is that it's a supply issue in a good way. Sorry, that there is more supply that is driving CPMs down. What me? Super excited. I was on a webinar yesterday with Triple Whale and Fin Loop, and they were going over these stats. To me, I'm just a huge nerd when it comes to this stuff. And I was looking at some of these numbers just being like, nobody realizes right now still 70 to 80% of all spend, and this is from Triple Whale who has tons of stats out there out there. Hopefully you don't have a triple oil competitor as a sponsor of this or anything.

Brett Curry:

I don't. No, but I'm friends with a lot of them and friends with Triple oil. Love those guys.

Jordan West:

Wonderful. So in the stats that they see, 70 to 80% of all ads spend is happening on meta. Just think about

Brett Curry:

The disruption and their purview is like D two C brands. So D two C brands, 70, 80% is on meta. Yeah,

Jordan West:

Totally. The amount of brands that have tried TikTok and been like, well, I'm just not getting the right attribution, right? Oh, attribution isn't working. All of that is going away. By the way, in the world of ai, mms are going to be so cheap and we're going to be able to measure all this stuff. Well, that brands are going to realize, oh, there's all of these 180 million people that could be discovering my products over on TikTok that aren't yet.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it totally makes sense. And it's one of those things, and we experienced this a lot on the YouTube side of things, where billions of users long engagement time is 40 some minutes a day. Average session for YouTube users are both behind TikTok, it seems. So there's a ton of supply there. There's really no reason that it shouldn't work other than if your approach is wrong, your creative is wrong or something like that. Same is true with TikTok. It has the users, people are addicted to it. So if you can get the right message there in the right way, there's zero reason it shouldn't work. And so if it hasn't price some fundamental reasons for that, which we can unpack. And so yeah, so it's about to hockey stick, even though it's been growing rapidly so far.

Jordan West:

But really when you look at it, you're like, okay, so the top brand is doing 15 million a month, right? That's not that big. It's not that big. That's not that big when you compare it to an Amazon or Shopify

Brett Curry:

Brands that's on Amazon or whatever. Yeah,

Jordan West:

It's not that big. And that's why brands are ignoring it. And I'm like, go ahead and ignore it at your own peril if you want to ignore it. And especially big brands, look at, I'm just going to name them. Look at Estee Lauder. They just laid off 6,000 people in q1, 6,000 people. They laid them off for a reason. They are having a hard time penetrating that market. It is a very difficult market to penetrate, and they are having a very difficult time. They own a ton of different brands and they laid 6,000 people off. That is wild. And it continues to happen. It's continuing to happen in the space for brands that are not changing. P and g just happened to them too, and I think it was around 6,000 as well. Now, AI I think is part of that, right? AI's part of that,

But I do think that these old dinosaurs are having a very difficult time moving over and thinking about social commerce. I'll tell you why, Brett, the reason why they're having such a hard time with this is that they don't get to say yes or no to the content that comes out. I sat in a boardroom recently, TikTok shop headquarters are in Seattle. I live just as Vancouver. And I went down there and I went down for a coffee, by the way. That's what I was told, that it was a coffee. I get in and there's a boardroom of 30 or 35 people.

Brett Curry:

I thought you went over to seven

Jordan West:

Coffee. There's your coffee. Sit

Brett Curry:

Down, we got questions for you. Yeah,

Jordan West:

Look, I didn't have a presentation or anything. I was just like, okay, so we're just going to do q and a or what's it going to look like? Don't worry, I'm really good on the spot. So it was good. But I was with the global key accounts team. So this is brands that do 4 billion in a bus and they have to be across. They can't just do 4 billion in the states. It has to be in multiple markets, right? Really big high-end team. And they said, what do you do when a brand, one of the biggest pushbacks that we get from the global key accounts team, from the, sorry, global Key accounts. Brands, is that they want to say yes or no to content. I'm like, okay. So the salesperson to me says, yes, absolutely you can, but you can't. You can't. You can't. I'm sorry. You just have to say yes to all of it or no to all of it. And that's why they're losing. That's why the big brands are losing. Yeah,

Brett Curry:

I mean, think about it this way. Are you going to say you want to say yes or no to Amazon? Product reviews pretty limited there. If it's fraudulent or whatever, illegal or malicious, you can get that removed. But other than that, those reviews are going to be there. So that's the way it works. And shoppers want those reviews and they trust those reviews and they look at those reviews. And the same is true on TikTok. People go there for product recommendations. I was talking to my 17-year-old daughter just the other day, and I was trying to convince her to use TikTok less just for her own mental health. She's very healthy, she's an amazing student, all these things. But I'm like, Hey, spend less time there. And she's like, well, but I search for stuff there and that's where I even crazy details, crazy stuff I want to find. I search on TikTok. I'm like, okay, makes sense. And so that's where people want to consume content. That's where they want to get product recommendations. So you can avoid it, but you're avoiding it at your own app peril.

Jordan West:

So this is really interesting. Let's go into social search here for a second. This is really interesting. All of the stuff out there right now is AI search is going to eat, Google AI search is going to eat Google. It's like, yeah, probably. I'd search for so many things using CHA bt,

Brett Curry:

But

Jordan West:

For the upcoming generation, social search will crush Google. It will absolutely crush Google. I mean, you see it on YouTube and I consider that social search. Social search. I think that's one of the places that's where I put money. I put money on my podcast on YouTube just because it's a great place for people to discover the podcast. And we get tons of subscribers just from putting a little bit of money behind it because that's where they're right. I'm talking about D two C here, but the same rules apply and social search is massive. So a brand that we work with, we started working with them last August. In August, we ran a study on TikTok because they're a global key account brand. And we ran a study to see how many searches they had on TikTok. The answer was zero. They didn't show up, nobody was searching for them on social search on TikTok. We ran that same study after bringing them to over 2 million a month on TikTok, and they had 880,000 searches in the previous two weeks. We ran this in December. Whoa. It's crazy. Crazy. Think about that. Think about all of, and then the halo to everywhere from that, it is the discovery engine. It's also, I think about these big brands, p and g, Estee Lauder, all these big brands. Do you know how much money they spend on product research and marketing research?

It's crazy.

Brett Curry:

It's a pretty meaningful line item. So we're talking about tens of millions of dollars a year. Yeah,

Jordan West:

Totally. And my bet is that a lot of that is going to go away with social commerce because you put the products out there. Now people, what they have to do, the reason why I love TikTok shop so much is I own brands over the years. That's the thing that we did. I ran brands. I love building brands. One of the things I hated was working with influencers. I despise working with influencers. The reason is because you never know what you're going to get. You can pay a thousand dollars for a post and be like, oh, is this going to be good? At least I like the CPM model. I think that there's a really interesting CCP M model like, well, because then you're paying for reach. So if the video works, I'm paying for it, no problem. Totally. But I'm not just randomly paying for something to go out there. That's the scary sort of part of working with influencers. So when TikTok shop came, I understood it immediately. I was like, this is the first time that we've aligned incentives. And how many salespeople do you hire? You're always aligning comp, the incentives with what you want to get out of them.

That is always what you do. And it's the same thing with influencers. You want to get sales out your

Brett Curry:

Influencers, show me the incentive, I'll show you the result. And it's very true here as well.

Jordan West:

And so all of these creators on TikTok shop are only incentivized to make money. Rarely are you paying out big commissions, right? Sorry, big retainers. Very, very rarely. And so let's think about this. You are completely incentivized. They are just trying to sell your product. And so what they're going to do is they're going to get really creative and they're going to think about the different ways to sell your product and what exactly is unique about the product to sell. And so now you get all of this market research, you're like, oh, it was when they said, use the eyeshadow under your eyes. And that's a cool use case. I dunno. I dunno makeup. But what I'm telling you is there's all of these different ways with a shoe brand that we work with. They came up with catch phrases, Brett, there's catchphrases that the brand now uses. There was a product for with a shoe brand that we work with, a very big, well-known shoe brand. It was a dog, the product, nobody was buying it, absolutely no one. And then the crazy thing is that they from this product ended up going absolutely viral on TikTok selling out completely. Now Sydney Sweeney is representing that product and it's now one of their core products, the ultimate influencer of our day right now. What is

Brett Curry:

This product? Can you mention this product?

Jordan West:

It's shoes. I don't dunno if I can mention the brand, but

Brett Curry:

You can probably search on TikTok for Sydney Sweeney and Shoes and you'll see it. So there you go. Yeah, so check it

Jordan West:

Out and you'll be like, Sydney Sweeney represented this shoe brand. It was incredible. Such a great play. But guys, these shoes were sitting doing nothing. They were dogs, absolutely. But this person came up with a really unique hook for this shoe, and it just ended up going absolutely viral. And again, then they got Sidney Sweeney on. Wow,

Brett Curry:

Crazy, crazy.

Jordan West:

This would've never happened. They never in their wildest dreams would've been able to do that through some kind of focus group, which is why I'm obsessed with talking to the big brands and all the time, I cannot wait to tell people about some of these huge brands that we're working with because it's really, really fun. And you'll be like, oh, this old chap is coming into the social commerce space. Interesting.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah, I love it. But talk about real time feedback, unvarnished truth. This is people taking action and voting with their attention span and with their wallet on what they want to pay attention to, what they care about. Focus groups are nice but misleading and kind of old and old approach, so get real time feedback. You can get that on TikTok for sure. So I love that. What are some misconceptions, because I talk at a lot of events as to you, I'm usually talking about YouTube or Amazon, but TikTok comes up a lot. I hear all kinds of wild things sitting over a lunch or dinner table or talking in hallways and stuff, but what are some misconceptions about TikTok shops that we need to bust and clarify?

Jordan West:

The misconception is that any old Amazon brand can come over and sell on TikTok. The biggest misconception that I see with all brands is that they think it's a demand capture channel. It's a demand gen channel. This is why so many agencies don't understand it because they come from Amazon world. You and I have talked about this. A lot of them have been trying to acquire us because they don't understand how to demand gen,

Brett Curry:

Right?

Jordan West:

When you come from direct to consumer, and I have to say when for me, coming from direct to consumer in apparel is, and not cheap apparel is the most difficult thing you can possibly do, right? Totally agree. Coming from there and trying to sell on TikTok shop is like, awesome. This is so easy. So

Brett Curry:

Easy.

Jordan West:

Yeah, you're just generating demand.

Brett Curry:

But

Jordan West:

I think that one of the biggest misconceptions is that it's just easy and that it's just going to work. It's like, no, it takes a long time. We tell people, when people come to us, we're like, are you willing to light 50 K on fire? It might not.

Are you willing to? Now one of your competitors has done pretty well, but you need to be willing to light $50,000 on fire or we can't talk because this is one of those channels. I recently was with the top TikTok shop agencies, the other ones, there was four of us in a room and we were talking and we're like, so how are things going? They're like, well, things are really, really good. And I'm like, well, how good. They're like, well, I would say we're about as good as the average all star baseball players batting average. Awesome. So about 400.

Brett Curry:

So yeah, yeah, three, maybe 400. Yeah, 400 is like Ted Williams type stuff. So

Jordan West:

Just remember that this is a brand new channel that we just don't know. Now what you get out of this channel is phenomenal. I just got off of a workshop that I was presenting on and I was talking about this, and I think that this might be the biggest takeaway that people get from this, Brett, is that that content, even if you light $50,000 on fire, let's just say, right? I'm being hyperbolic here, but let's just say that you light $50,000 on fire and you get back $20,000 in sales or something like that. You still have all of this market research and all of this content now that you can repurpose across other channels. YouTube being one of the main ones. How much inventory is now on shorts? Think about all of this incredible content. I think of TikTok Shop as the content. TikTok shop content particularly is the content that moves across channels. TikTok is a Rubicon, so a Rubicon being a door that you can enter, but you cannot leave. It's a one way door. TikTok content is a Rubicon. It can travel wherever you wanted to travel. You want to travel to Meta?

Brett Curry:

Yeah.

Jordan West:

Awesome. We're obsessed right now. So one of the things I didn't tell you before at Social Commerce Club, which is the agency that I run, unless they're a huge brand that's working with a performance agency that they just can't get out of the contract, we're actually not taking on anyone that doesn't work with us across channels.

Brett Curry:

Wow. Yeah, I

Jordan West:

Know.

Brett Curry:

Crazy because that's smart. I mean, you've got the greatest opportunity to influence real growth if you do it that way.

Jordan West:

Totally. And all of the brands that are working with us are crushing where they're seeing all of their channels up here. And you and I know this consolidation play in the agency world. The reason why we're doing it is so that we can actually help brands with their entire business.

This is the reason why you and me and people like us are doing this sort of thing because it's so important for all of the areas. And so I picture these creators. First of all, a year from now or two years from now, every single brand is going to have a creator community. And if they don't, they're not going to be around. They're going to have a creator community and they're going to be leveraging that creator community. I tweeted about this yesterday. I had a UGC creator quote me, $450 for one post and $50 a hook. I'm like, no. In the world of TikTok, that will not happen. It just will not happen because TikTok shop, they're just going to do it for free and they're going to probably make five videos. We try it. Social commerce club. We try and get five videos out of every single TikTok shop creator. Interesting. Sorry. Out of every sample we send out, that is our goal. That is one of the big metrics we do that we

Brett Curry:

Run every week. Why is that? So why five pieces, and then what are you doing to ensure that? I love this angle. Okay,

Jordan West:

So let me walk you through the numbers. So we know that we must live in some sort of mathematical, whatever this world is that we live in, but there's weird things that happen with numbers, and the Pareto principle is just one of them. We know that 80 20 works all the time. You can just look at an end. You can continue to go down on 80 20. So the more videos we get, so let's say that we seed to 200 influencers and we get five videos from each of them. We're getting a thousand work at that point. We're getting a thousand videos from them from there, 200 of those videos are going to be pretty good. So 200 of those videos are going to be good. Now take the 80 20 of those 200. So now we're looking at 40 videos of those will probably go viral. The more videos we get, the more chance we have to go viral. That's just how it works.

Brett Curry:

Makes

Jordan West:

Sense. It's just the numbers of what works and

Brett Curry:

Why the PA principle works. The 20 rule is so one out of five might work at all. So if a creator only creates four, they might not have gotten to the one that actually works yet. And so those all four are a bust at that point.

Jordan West:

So the numbers are really important. Putting in the numbers, the 650 podcast episodes, this is where this comes in handy, right? You're like, I'm just going to put in the reps. Most brands will send out a hundred samples and be like, TikTok shop doesn't work. I'm like, you're right. You're right with that attitude. You're absolutely right. That's where I get fatherly.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, exactly. Not with that attitude. It won't. Yeah. So that's amazing. Let's talk about this for a second then. I want to get into some X factors in a minute of what really moves the needle in results. I'm sure it's a numbers game, of course, but what product categories, what product offers, what tends to work well on TikTok and what tends not to work as well on TikTok? What's your experience there?

Jordan West:

So in general, now there are exceptions to this rule. High A OV does not work high, high A OV does not work. Now, mind you, I cannot tell you which brand this is, but we are working with one of the high A OV electronics brand that I think is going to crush their A OV is going to be around 400 bucks, but really fun product that you want to buy on TikTok shop. Now, I've seen Dyson. I wish that we worked at Dyson. It'd be a sweet logo and just very fun to work with because I love their products. I've seen Dyson starting to crush on TikTok shop. Think about how Spencer Dyson are. So there

Brett Curry:

Are exceptions to every rule,

Jordan West:

Exceptions to every rule.

Brett Curry:

Couch, oovs, like AOV is over a hundred, or what are you considering high OV here?

Jordan West:

I would say anything over 200, I wouldn't touch Ninja's. Done really well. So Ninja has sold their creamy, which is round the $200 mark and done a really, really good job. Bunch of the influencers at Social Commerce Club, sorry, creators at Social Commerce Club work for Ninja as well, and have done really, really well. So they're in this multimillions of dollars a month in sales, so it can work, but I wouldn't go there first if I was a big Got it.

Brett Curry:

Totally makes sense.

Jordan West:

Yeah. I would work with TikTok, shop creators to create content. So we do that at Social Commerce Club and be like, Hey, let's not go all in because we have to send these massive samples too. Really big backpack company came to us recently wanting to work with us, and their cost of goods is like a hundred bucks per backpack. And I was like, eh,

Brett Curry:

Tough man.

Jordan West:

I don't want to send that many out because your post rate is only going to be about 80%. So 20% of those aren't even going to post. So that just happens. That's just part of TikTok shop, unfortunately.

Brett Curry:

Yep. Yep. Great. So hi ov, avoid that. Any particular categories or impulse purchases, which that's lower A OV and stuff like that, but what categories work versus don't work, generally speaking?

Jordan West:

So supplements is an interesting one. If you are a supplement brand, you're going to have a hard time working with an agency, because I actually saw recently on the TikTok shop chat, somebody's like, Hey, I've got 20 supplement brands. Don't want to work with them anymore. Anybody want them? Because it's just a grind. It is a grind because let's be honest, 90% of supplements are bs. Right?

Brett Curry:

Right. That's

Jordan West:

True. And so you're

Brett Curry:

Trying to, I take a lot of supplements, but most of them are garbage. Yeah,

Jordan West:

Totally. And so you have to wade through and figure out what is a good supplement? What do I actually want to stand behind? And creators are kind of getting sick of working with supplements. Now, another reason why supplements are so tough is because there's so many guidelines that will get your account shut down if you're a creator and you talk about the supplement. So they're just like, I don't want to touch it. That's why it's getting difficult to sell supplements there. Now, can you Absolutely. Some of the biggest brands out there are supplement brands. Goalie is still one of the top ones, right? They've done an awesome job, but also they sell great stuff, goalie. We all know and trust Goalie already. So there's already that factor. So supplements, I'm sorry, you're just going to have a more difficult time doing that, right? Yeah, you can try. You can try, but it's just going to be a lot more difficult. So just so you are aware,

Brett Curry:

Right? But things like beauty, fashion, maybe food and Bev, some of those categories tend to work well, right?

Jordan West:

Yeah. We have a new beauty brand, fairly well known who came to us. They were doing 6,000 a month. We've gotten them this month they'll probably do 200 K profitably. So again, people are like, oh, those aren't big numbers. It's like, well, actually they'll have 30 million views. Do you know how much in media value that is? Crazy. Amounts insane. And every other

Brett Curry:

Channel is popping. It's low cpm. That's an insane amount of money.

Jordan West:

Yeah,

Brett Curry:

Totally.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. And you've got now, if you're selling on Amazon or on your own Shopify store or whatever, to buy those 30 million views on YouTube or on Meta or on tv, forget about that. It's a massive, massive budget. Massive.

Jordan West:

Probably had a $30 CPM to buy those views

Brett Curry:

Depending on where you're buying. Yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe you get it down into the single digits if you're buying certain YouTube areas or like Amazon DSP or something. But if you're buying premium stuff like YouTube Select or Hulu or Netflix, $30 CPM for sure.

Jordan West:

So people don't get this, Brett, these are premium placements. These are in the feed.

This is all premium inventory and it's organic inventory. The thing that we didn't talk about before was the ability then to take that content use. There's a tool that I like called Funnel that identifies the content. Then you can whitelist that content right in there. So you just ask for whitelisting one click over into meta, right? And then there's awesome. I mean, you'd be able to speak more into whitelisting on YouTube, but there's very simple ways to whitelist on YouTube as well, right? This content, and this is the way of the future, and this is how brands are going to succeed.

Brett Curry:

Totally makes sense. Walk me through some, what are some of the X factors? What are some of the things that need to be true about your brand, about your product? Is it feature driven? Is it something new and novel? Is it something that's just really visual? What are some of the X factors that can help determine whether this is going to be a success or not?

Jordan West:

So that's the crazy thing. You can sell boring products on TikTok shop, right? I made a whole YouTube video on this. Here's how you position boring products, and actually boring products do really well. It's what the creators do with it. It's the little bit of the value that you give to the creators and the little bit of direction that you give to them that really make your product go and it doesn't need products, don't need X factors, they just don't. That's great. I could probably sell a pencil on TikTok shop. I've often thought I'm like, I want to become a TikTok shop creator. Just I can show people, Hey, here's how you do it. Here's how you're going to go about this. Storytelling is a really big one. People who tell really good stories, they crush.

Brett Curry:

Nobody thinks they're selling, telling that story that lands it's benefit oriented, and then yeah, it can be something simple every day and can still work. So it's amazing. So

Jordan West:

No X factor. I hate to tell everyone the X factor is your creativity.

Brett Curry:

Good. That's good. Yep, yep. So your creativity, the creative's, creativity, creativity, totally makes sense. So walk us through high level. What does the TikTok Shops playbook look like? So how am I starting, how am I hopefully not completely burning my 50 K or whatever, but how am I starting? How am I finding influencers? How am I seeding products? How am I testing, iterating, learning, and then how am I eventually getting to viral success?

Jordan West:

Totally. So let me walk through the zero to a hundred K playbook. There's three phases to this playbook, okay? So number one is make sure your products are set up correctly, right? This is a massive part of this. So make sure that your products are set up very similar to Amazon, where you want to make sure that you have the ability to use to sample. So if you were using a bundle, sorry, you're trying to sell a bundle, which I highly recommend that you do, don't just try and sell $15 products. Try and bundle those products. You don't want to send your bundle out to them. You want to the creator, you want to send out one product to the creator, and then they talk about your bundle. So making sure that stuff like that is set up correctly. Making sure that your listings, your TikTok shop listings are pretty and are going to convert. So there's a bunch of stuff. I won't get into all of that, but making sure that all of that is set up correctly is really important. Then using, I do not recommend this movement out there right now of people manually reaching out to people. I'm like, there's no value in manually reaching out, use a bot.

So I recommend reacher. I've been an advisor to theirs for quite a while. They're awesome guys. They're really building some cool stuff. I recommend using them, or Yuca is the other one that's out there. Reach out to as many influencers as you or creators as you possibly can. So again, two different things. Creators, influencers.

Brett Curry:

So you're reaching out to them, offering them product, seeing if they're interested. What does that outreach message look like?

Jordan West:

Totally. So sorry, before that, one thing that I want to make sure that people understand is that you can syndicate your reviews from D two C over into TikTok shop. Really important that you do that, because what you're trying to do at first is build up all of this social proof that you don't have yet. So if people know, oh, good, there's 7,000 reviews that they have from D two C that you move over there with. Awesome. Judge Me is a really good one. It's like 15 bucks a month. It actually will scrape all of your Amazon reviews and move them over again. Nice. I did not give you that advice. I think it's somewhere grayish in terms of service. Just know that you can do that

Brett Curry:

One, but you need the social proof there for the

Jordan West:

Influencers and for the shoppers. Exactly. So the biggest thing that you're actually trying to do is you're trying to sell to the influencers at first. So what you're trying to do is be like, Hey, by the way, we've sold X number of millions of these over on Amazon, over on Shopify. We're new to TikTok shop. We would love you. Look like you've got some great content and that you can really help us out here. We'd love to offer you X percentage to be able to do this. Now, be as generous as possible at first. So offer whatever your even is without running ads. See what that is and offer that. If you can offer 40% commission at first, do it like, Hey, look, I'm going to offer you 40% commission, and if your videos also let them know if your videos do well. We're going to put ad spend behind your videos right now. So greater

Brett Curry:

Visibility, greater audience growth for you potentially as an influencer. Is that kind of part of the benefit there or the pitch to them?

Jordan West:

Totally. And get in on the ground floor, all of the things, all the messages that you would use in multi-level marketing, just use here. Get on the ground floor, get your friends involved. I

Brett Curry:

Love that. Love that. It's hilarious.

Jordan West:

So one of the things that you're going to want to do though at first is make sure that you have two different levels of commission set up. One for organic and one for ads. Really important that you do that. You do not want to also give them 40%

Brett Curry:

On ads because ads, you're funding a lot of that reach. So that needs to be a lower commission.

Jordan West:

Totally. And as more and more creators get on there and more people create content on TikTok, it's just harder and harder to go viral. And so you'll want to spend a decent amount of money on ads. Now when you get to a certain point, there's a screenshot that I shared this morning. It was like $3,500 worth of ads spend for like $55,000 worth of sales. That's crazy. Crazy. That is what happens when you start getting this flywheel going. That's like a 14 return on ad spend. Just wild numbers doesn't

Brett Curry:

Anywhere else.

Jordan West:

They're not crazy numbers, but it takes a while. You need to be patient. These things take a while to be able to happen and snowball. So just know that this takes a while. So that's all part of phase one is getting those Got it messages out there. You want to be on it. So as soon as they say yes and make sure at this point too, I don't know how detailed we can exactly get here, but I'll try and get into some of the gotchas. So one of them is making sure that you don't auto approve samples. Make sure you want to, when have a cast a pretty wide net, there's going to be people that say yes that you don't want, right? Right. Cast a wide net. See who wants to take the sample and then approve them from there, right? But don't be too picky. Definitely not too picky at first. I don't ever go after any creators that don't already have GMV. They have to have GMV. They have to have produced some revenue for somebody before I'm going to go after. Makes sense?

Brett Curry:

Yep. Yep.

Jordan West:

So that's the first phase.

Brett Curry:

That's all phase one.

Jordan West:

So yeah, what's phase two? So phase two now is seeing what works and pouring gasoline on that fire. So now you've gotten to your first thousand sales in phase one, and now you're looking and seeing, okay, who do I now want to recruit for? A couple different things. One is brand owned content is awesome, and what you can do is you can actually work with some of these creators, give them a retainer and a percentage of sales to start posting on your brand handle. So that's one that TikTok is going to be pushing a lot in Q3 this year. From what we've heard, they're going to be pushing brand owned handles a lot, and so this is where you can start to hire a creator to do that for you, for your brand handle. So start identifying some of those creators now. Start putting money behind creators that are doing well and let them know.

By the way, if you do 10 videos for me, I'm going to put minimum a thousand dollars behind your ads, behind your content. That's where you start to get this flywheel going. Start to then take those people and put them into a brand owned community. Like I said, every single brand is going to have a brand owned community in the future. We have a massive, really high GMV creator community at Social Commerce Club that we have curated and is incredible. Start to take those people and put them into your own brand community. You can use Discord, you can use WhatsApp. I like WhatsApp personally. I think it's the millennial in me that likes it. Discords a great option as well though. It's just the engagement on Discord isn't quite as high to be totally honest. People have a million discord. Discord

Brett Curry:

Is kind of messy. I don't really enjoy being on there personally,

Jordan West:

But it's like being in another Slack group. You're just like, oh, another Slack group. I just can't keep up with all these. Oh my gosh, yes. So this is something to do at this point, and then this is where you're going to identify. So at first, I forgot to mention in phase one, you're going to pick your top three skews. After this, your top three products after this is where you're going to start to pour gasoline on one of them. Go after one of them as your Heroku, right? You'll find out which one works really well, and then you're going to go after that. This is where you're going to start scaling,

Brett Curry:

But I like that versus just testing one because you may be wrong. That may not be the one that takes off or catches fire on TikTok. So try three, then zero in on your hero product.

Jordan West:

Totally. And if you're a huge brand listening to this, try 10. Just try again. Try some of your products that might not be working because people might not be searching them on Amazon or caring about them on D two C. Just try. The worst thing that you can do is you sent out a bunch of products that weren't moving anyway, and you got some good content out of them. This is where you're going to want to start to build your relationships, and you're going to want to start to ask about whitelisting across other platforms. So again, this is why I am so obsessed with this where I'm like, no, you're not brands. You may not work with us on TikTok shop unless we have the whole thing, because otherwise you are wasting all of this incredible content. That's the only content you should be using is all of this creator content listed. The studies

Brett Curry:

Are you're only get a fraction of the benefit. You're creating all this content. You got all this gold that's being created here, you got to redeploy it or else you're not getting max value.

Jordan West:

Well, meta just put out a study, and there's actually five of them, five different case studies. The sort of average across the case studies is that whitelisted ads, the CPA is 50% lower than brand ads would you not do? Why would you not stop literally everything you're doing right now and go whitelist every single ad that you have because people buy from other people that they like know and trust, not from your brand. Nobody wants to buy from your brand. Maybe they do, but they would much rather buy from somebody they like know and trust and a third party that is talking about Totally. It's the same principle in everything. This is the way that SEO works, right? This is why still the number one signal in SEO is backlinks because

Brett Curry:

It backlinks, even when Google denies it, it's still backlink. It is a vote of confidence from the rest of the internet right there. Social

Jordan West:

Proof, social proof. There's no better way than for you to do that. That's why people like Brett and I go on each other's podcast to say, Brett, you are an awesome guy. I just gave you some of my social proof over and I'm hoping you're going to do the same, Brett.

Brett Curry:

Yes, exactly, exactly. But it makes a huge, huge difference. So I love that. Okay, I think we're ready for phase three then.

Jordan West:

So phase three is where we get a lot of brands into, which is really fun. So this is a hundred thousand dollars a month plus. This is where you are going to now go out to an even bigger creator community. So this is where I like to start sending out. So if you had a hundred thousand dollars a month, this is where I want you to start sending out 500 samples a month to only the highest SGMV creators because they can see how much money people have done on your particular skew, right? Or on your particular product id. PID is as people internally always call it, I'm like, can you just call it product id? I hate the word pi. Pi, but PID is also where you house multiple. You can house multiple skews in a pi. So anyway, there's all that boring. You can cut that part out.

Brett Curry:

No, let's leave it in. The occasional touch of nerdiness is great. We want that.

Jordan West:

So this is where you're going to start to go after a lot of high GMV creators and then pour gasoline on the other ones. So now throughout all of this, we're using different kinds of ads throughout. So at first, during phase one, we're using product shopping ads and video shopping ads. Product shopping ads are essentially Google Shopping ads. So if you think about them like that, they happen on search. Again, social search is massive. So they're happening over there and we're just leaving it wide open. We're doing video shopping ads, which are basically spark ads, whitelisted ads from these creators. We're just getting permission to use them and we're doing those in phase one. In phase two, we're going to start to set some target return on ad spends and see how much better we can get as far as the amount of efficacy that we're getting from those ads during phase one.

Don't care. Just don't care. You're just trying to get to a certain level where other creators want to work with you. During phase three is where we're going to transition into GM v max and GMV Max is like, it's their AI on steroids that's working for you. Once you get to that certain level into phase three, that's where I recommend going into GMV Max. Now, the problem is you do not choose where your ad spend goes with GMV Max. So I recommend using that at the end. It's like a very automated system. This is where during phase three, you now want to start identifying other products that could potentially work and start seeding those products as well. Interesting. That's the really high level playbook for you.

Brett Curry:

So I love that. It was really a very clear breakdown, and it'll be all be in the show notes. We can see it, but it sounds like ads are actually a pretty important component of this, right? Did you ever see someone excel with TikTok shops without the ad component?

Jordan West:

Nope. Nope, nope. Ads have to be a

Brett Curry:

Part of that You use at every stage, or mostly like stage two and stage three or phase two and three.

Jordan West:

No ads need to be a part of it the entire way through the entire time, the entire way through. Unfortunately, you just cannot just send product out and hope it goes viral.

Brett Curry:

Totally makes sense. Totally makes sense. Love it.

Jordan West:

Once you pour ads onto it, creators want to work with you, you're going to get into the algorithm a lot more, and it's just the way that it works. It's unfortunate too, for organic YouTube, it's the same thing, right? There was a heyday and maybe, and also if you hit the algo absolutely perfectly right on organic YouTube, you can do this. For the most part, you need to promote that with ads to get it into the algo and start working for you. It's just the way, I hate that that's the game, but that's just the game.

Brett Curry:

It's the game. It's the game. Totally makes sense there. Totally. It makes sense. Well, let's step back a little bit. First of all, this has been fantastic. Thank you, Jordan. We're about out of time, but I want to talk about one final topic here as we wrap up, or one big topic and then a subset. So social commerce, you and I are both very bullish on this, obviously. I think we're really in the early innings. It's going to take off. I think meta is going to solve it. I think Google's going to solve it, or YouTube rather, with YouTube affiliate and YouTube shopping and things like that. But what are you guys doing right now with YouTube? So I know your focus is mostly TikTok shops, but you guys are doing some cool stuff on YouTube as well. So tell us about that.

Jordan West:

Totally. So we're beta testing something right now with a few really big brands that I, I'm so excited about, and these are creator ad reads, right? Within YouTube videos. The big issue as everybody knows is trying to actually get ahold of these creators and then negotiate with them. So we found an awesome partner that we are working with right now that does this using ai, and also there's all of the brand safety issues, all of this kind of stuff. We are seeing some insane, insane results with this right now. Nothing. You guys have seen

Brett Curry:

You paying them those creators on a CPM basis. So you're using this AI tool to find them. Then you're paying them on a CCP M basis or commission

Jordan West:

Them on the CCP M basis. Exactly. And the AI is taking care of all of the measurement and everything in the background. Wow. The cool thing is, is that you're actually only paying for the first 30 days of CPMs. Interesting. And YouTube gets better over time or the right videos. Do the right videos get better over time? They get the long tail on those videos, massive long tail on those videos. So it ends up being, so let's say you're paying like a $50 CPM at first, your CCP M ends up usually coming in at about half of that. The actual effect of ccpm plus, these are incredible reads, and they don't show up as ads. They're not skippable, right?

Brett Curry:

Yep. It's in the content, the creator, it's Mr. Beast. I don't know that he does that, but other creators being like, Hey, this is the thing I use and this is why I love it, Ridge wallets. It's how Ridge Wallets really initially got their hockey sick growth, and now they do a ton of stuff, biggest spinner on meta stuff like that, but they did live Nvidia reads with influencers or with creators on YouTube. That's kind how they took off.

Jordan West:

So to me, this is our foray at Social Commerce Club into YouTube until the YouTube, until YouTube figures out how to replicate what TikTok Shop has done. I just want to talk to that. They're working on it. They're working on it. I think they'll get there, but they're not there yet. For sure. I'll tell you why I'm scared about it is because their platform, YouTube's platform is not built for virality in the same way that TikTok is. We have a TikTok shop creator that has less than 10,000 followers who produce $250,000 of GMV last month, less than 10,000 followers. That's not the way that YouTube works, right?

Brett Curry:

Think the algorithm not that aggressive. You don't go that viral that quick. Yeah.

Jordan West:

Last time I checked, you have to have 10,000 followers to even be in the affiliate program versus TikTok. It's like anyone can go be a TikTok shop creator, and it's incredible the amount of people that are making careers out of this and literally paying their house off. It's wild. The people that are doing this YouTube has not yet figured that out, and I have talked to 'em many times and told them, here's your issues that you're having right now, is that not anyone can just go on there and do this. Right? And maybe that's on purpose. I don't know. I don't know. I think that it's going to be a really cool channel. I'm bullish on anything Google does. They do, right? So I

Brett Curry:

Think they'll figure it out. I mean, the creators are there, the viewers are there, the watch time is there, all the components are there. So unless YouTube just completely screws it up again and again, I think they're going to eventually nail it. But you're right, and content doesn't go viral as quickly. Back to my 17-year-old who I'm trying to convince to spend less time on TikTok, she's like, YouTube shorts. I think this is going to sound real professional, but I think the work she used was it's booty cheeks compared to TikTok.

Jordan West:

I've never heard that term before.

Brett Curry:

Isn't it funny? She's like, okay, that's a weird way to say it, but okay. She's like, no, TikTok learns you so quickly and the content is all really valuable and what I want, I don't get the same thing on YouTube shorts is what she said. So I think YouTube's got some things to figure out there, but I am bullish on it. I think they will figure it out. And so man, I love what you're doing within Nvidia live reads. Is that something you can share that source? So that's probably a little bit proprietary there, the AI tool and what you're using to manage all of that.

Jordan West:

As of right now, I'm going to keep that one between. Totally get it totally between you and me. So the interesting thing actually, we were actually, I was doing some sponsorship kind of stuff with them and I realized, and they came to me and they said, Hey, we have all these giant brands coming in and we thought that this tool could be used without an agency and actually it needs an agency.

Brett Curry:

Interesting, interesting.

Jordan West:

It needs somebody monitoring it and the AI cannot yet say approve these things and the brand safety is really important. So there has to be someone in the middle. So it's either a full-time person on your team or an agency. Right. Doing it. Totally makes

Brett Curry:

Sense. Totally

Jordan West:

Makes sense.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. Well Jordan, this has been fantastic, man. I absolutely love what you guys are up to. Love watching your journey, love doing the podcast swap with you. Super fun. And so if there are brands out there that are like, man, I need to get on this TikTok shop train, but I need someone who knows what they're doing to guide me through those three phases, how can they get in touch with you? Who should get in touch with you? And then how else can we get our daily fill of Jordan?

Jordan West:

Let's go to LinkedIn. I am very active on LinkedIn and Twitter, so you can go there and just search for Jordan West marketer over there. But we work with two levels of brands. So we work with the bigger brands on a full service sort of basis. You can go to social commerce club.com. That's the classic agency offering. There's something actually recently that we just launched right now that is in beta. It's called Tick TikTok Shop os Plus. The idea is that we actually walk smaller brands through who should not be hiring an agency who need to be doing this stuff on their own, right? These are brands under 5 million ish generally, and this walks them through their first six months of scaling from zero to a hundred thousand. We meet every single week. You can tap into all the resources that we have as an agency, but it's more of a done with you type of program. We are like, every single brand we talk to about this is like yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Because they want to learn the muscle. They just don't have the strategy or the expertise to do it, and we do.

So very

Brett Curry:

Excited about that.

Jordan West:

Love that,

Brett Curry:

Love that. And what's that called One more time? And that's all@socialcommerceclub.com.

Jordan West:

That's all@socialcommerceclub.com. That's called TikTok

Brett Curry:

Shop OS Plus. Amazing. Love it. Jordan, Wes, ladies and gentlemen, Jordan, really appreciate it, man. Ton of fun. Can't wait for round three or four, whatever it's going to be when we do this again.

Jordan West:

Absolutely. We not nearly as much time in between this time, Brett. Okay.

Brett Curry:

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Let's make it a regular segment. That's what we got to do. Love it. Awesome brother so much, Brett. Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? And if you've not done so, we'd love that review on iTunes. Makes my day, helps other people find the pod. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍