S14 E8: Chatting with Zain (The TikTok Shop Expert)

0:00Nik:Welcome back to Limited Supply, the podcast where we get deep into the tactical and strategic side of e-commerce, digital marketing, and building consumer brands. I'm your host, Nick Sharma. I've spent the last nine years building, scaling, and investing in brands. And through this show and my weekly newsletter at nick.co slash email, I'm here to share everything I've learned. The wins, the losses, the experiments, the tactics, and the insights, all so you can unlock your next$100 ,000 in revenue. Today's episode is a good one, but before we dive in, let me tell you about our chosen sponsor for this week's episode.

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1:07Nik:Then it sends it at the exact moment that that shopper is ready to buy. BFCM is behind you and now's the time to build for your biggest year yet. Old and lame retention emails are so 2025. Book a demo by December 31st and get 50 % off your first 60 days at instant.one.sharma and set up your brand to dominate 2026. What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. Today, we've got my buddy Zen on. He is, if you don't follow him on Twitter, you maybe do, or you've maybe seen his tweets. He's always got the funniest memes and shit posts within the e-commerce and direct consumer industry.

1:46Nik:But Zen is a really, he's just really knowledgeable when it comes to all things social shopping. So today we focus a lot on TikTok shop. It's kind of been his bread and butter for the last couple of years. He started by... Well, he'll get into it. But he started by basically launching a few brands of his own. They were doing so well. And then he started doing it as a service. And everything from creative affiliates, how you get your first affiliates on board, what kind of image carousel you put in the actual gallery on TikTok shop. How do you think about percentages, commissions? How does Goalie do it?

2:19Nik:All this stuff we dove into. So enjoy the episode. It's a nice quick episode. Hits you with all the good stuff. We didn't spend too much time kind of verbalizing shitposting until the very end. But check out the episode. Let me know what you think. And whatever you think we should dive deeper on from this episode, let me know. DM me on Twitter or shoot me an email. I'm just nick at nick.co now. And let me know what you like the best because we're going to go way deeper. I'm going to try to create some more like masterclass style episodes where we just go grab experts and go super deep and teach a bunch of things.

2:56Nik:So anyways, enjoy the episode and looking forward to hear what your thoughts are. Well, Zane, it's amazing to have you here. We've met in person a few times. I've obviously giggled at your Twitter for months now. And it's exciting to meet you in person or not in person, but virtually and do this. So thank you for coming on and for doing this. Yeah, man. Thanks for having me. So I think, you know, everybody, there's a lot of things going on right now. There's Black Friday. We've got the holidays. We've got that little Q5 period in between Christmas and New Year's and then New Year's starts and we've got the Wellness Super Bowl.

3:32Nik:Then we go into, you know, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, all big, very Hallmark kind of holidays coming up mixed with these non-so-Hallmark holidays. and everybody's just thinking about what they're doing from a sales standpoint. One of the biggest channels that a lot of brands are now trying to focus on is TikTok Shop, which is your specialty. So I'm excited to get into that today. But I guess before we get into what's coming up next, how would you explain the state of social shopping right now in the world of consumer brands? Yeah, for sure. It's the new hot thing that you're seeing. not just like you know short videos ugc that's kind of been around tiktok shop just enables that to be like much easier but live streaming has been kind of the thing that people are watching we're seeing a lot of like streamers become kind of like the cultural norm like people are watching people like speed and like they're getting like tons of views and tons of live streams and like the whole younger audience is kind of obsessed with it so we're kind of watching that transition into like more of a shopping thing already in china and other parts of asia like live streaming is huge it's making up like 10 20 30 percent of e-commerce sales um so it's still like in its infancy but you know it's like the cool um kid on the block and it's just i think something for all brands to keep an eye on yeah it's interesting i feel like the live streaming um there's a huge wave of like live streaming which then kind of kicked off clipping i feel um and clipping at least my definition is the it's just a bunch of kids who are taking long form longer form pieces of content, chopping them up into what they think will generate views or engagement, and then posting it up and trying to gather as many views as possible because they get paid on a CPM basis.

5:17Nik:And the people paying them at first, they were like, you know, it was live streamers, like a speed would get clipped up and then they'd put a casino logo on it and a casino would pay them, you know, some CPM. But now it's a lot of consumer brands also who are starting to play around with the clipping strategy and pumping out crazy amounts of content. But actually, before we get into all this, I realized, let's give yourself an intro. Can you just give, as if you're bragging, or as if your mom was bragging, how would your mom introduce you? Yeah, for sure. Dude, my mom probably would have no idea what I do for a living, even if I've told her like 10 times.

5:51But yeah, we started off on the brand side, like we've been doing. My partner and I have been doing e-commerce since 2018. we had a couple e-commerce brands that we scaled to like each one was like seven close to eight figures in in revenue we launched one of them on tiktok shop in october of 23 that did really well we were posting a lot about it twitter linkedin people just kind of assumed that it was just like a lead gen funnel and they were pinging out like hey run our tiktok shop and we're like we don't really do that right we just have our own brands started referring them out to agencies at that time in 23 because it was so new that like a lot of these agencies didn't really understand TikTok shop they were just trying to cash in on the gold rush so we saw the opportunity there um you know we were we were referring people to agencies but they weren't having a good experience so we launched the agency last year and now that's become our main thing like the brands are bootstrapped we don't really answer to anyone but with the agency we have clients so that's been kind of our main focus um that's been doing pretty well it's like still pretty boutique um we have around like 20 clients across health and wellness, food and beverage, you know, supplements is probably like 80 % of our clients.

6:56And then a lot of food and bed brands as well.

6:59Nik:Amazing. I feel like I've never seen a supplement brand not crushing. Have you? It's very rare. As long as it's not like luxury price point, like TikTok shop is really good for like the cheap stuff. If it's like$20,$30, that's perfect. If you're trying to do like a luxury supplement or like you're only selling bundles, it's like 70, 80 bucks. That's not really the right fit for TikTok shop. That's the only time we've really struggled. But yeah, supplements does really well. Even food and beverage, as long as it's a good price point, that's so easy. You send something out, someone eats it on camera, it's very TikTok native.

7:29They're like, oh, this is delicious. The sales kind of roll in.

7:32Nik:You mentioned TikTok native. Can you talk a little bit more about that? What do you think constitutes to be TikTok native? Yeah. So if you think about the millennial, Gen Z, I think there was a tweet that kind of went viral um lately where like everyone's like kind of using the same font like a surrey font or whatever yeah i'll say the blending yeah exactly that kind of blending type stuff does really well because the younger audience right a lot of millennials it's a lot of gen z if it looks native and it's just like more some blending but also very colorful as well like things that really stand out because you're you're trying to make a product that like someone pulls out on a video and it stops a scroll which is you know pretty difficult um so it can't be something that's just like for like an older audience.

8:13It can't be like 40, 50, 60. It just has to be geared towards a younger audience. That's typically who is more active in buying on TikTok shop.

8:21Nik:Totally. And when you talk about like supplements doing well on TikTok, what kind of supplements are doing well? Is it like the colostrums? Is it vitamin gummies? Is it like, you know, daily vitamins? Is it vitamin C? What kind of stuff is it? Yeah. So it kind of always like cycling, like the one that like people kind to know the most for tiktok shop just because goalie kind of exploded with it out of the gate was ashwagandha now that's like a little bit tougher it's like it's usually like something pops off and then every supplement brand kind of jumps on because it's just so much quicker to get to manufacturing than it was like in the past like within six months it's being copied so ashwagandha has done pretty well the daily vitamins do well but it's not really like a problem solving type thing so it's just it's not going to get as much any supplement that can help with like weight loss or if it's like you know something that's gonna help with like more appearance those are gonna do well even if you know you kind of have to be careful what you say so even things like magnesium things like you said like colostrum those are starting to get big creatine is pretty big protein as long as it's within kind of a kind of that tiktok native like just product form or form factor of like if it's like a gummy if it's like a stick pack that tends to do well.

9:36If it's just like pills or powder, that's just not as cool. And it's just not going to perform as well.

9:41Nik:Yeah. I remember when Lemmy started doing TikTok shop and it was blowing my mind how fast they were getting sales. I mean, some of their SKUs here have, you know, 26 ,000 units sold on a bundle of two SKUs together. How do some of these brands, like, how do they get started? Like, what is the secret to getting started and doing it right? Because from what I remember or from what I know, it's like, it's really about building that social proof. It's about getting affiliates on board. You have to do some work to even make it attractive to those early people as well. Like, is there sort of a playbook or a formula or something that's kind of standard that you go through?

10:20Yeah, for sure. So like TikTok has like a graph that basically shows GMV or like revenue versus number of videos posted. And it's basically a straight line like the more the larger volume of content you have coming in the more chances of something going viral like when tiktok shop started it was like you could throw a shop link on and like one out of 50 videos would go viral just because they were trying to juice it and they're trying to get brands on board now it's like maybe like one in 100 one in 150 maybe even one in 200 so you just need like a ton of content coming in every month every brand that you see whether it's lemmy or like any brand that's doing over a million gmv per month they have at least a thousand videos being posted per month plus also like live streaming so they're just sampling out like crazy like let me i can guarantee you so it sends out several hundred samples per month um they're just really maximizing the amount of content that's coming in they might have live streaming as well sometimes it takes you know that makes up like 10 15 percent um but primarily it's short video primarily it's sending out a ton of samples some brands also give like flat fees like they'll send you a sample and they'll give you like 10 20 50 bucks for video just to post like a video every day, maximize that content, then you put ad spend behind what's working.

11:29And that's what is what really drives you to those kind of numbers.

11:33Nik:Wow. So like, so on, on paid social, I feel like a good hit rate is like around, you know, five to 10%. Uh, here it sounds like basically half a percent to 1 % is pretty standard hit rate. Um, and I totally agree. I mean, every time I've talked to a brand, like a founder that crushes on Tik TOK shop, they always say it's a volume game. and you know the more content you put out the luckier you get so one thing i heard from uh from another brand was like they almost built their own ambassador network of a few hundred people have you seen brands doing that a lot or is that more like less common yeah so like the brands are like coming from a different platform where they already had that like let's say they built that out on instagram let's say it's something like comfort where they already have like tons of ambassadors they kind of shift that over to tiktok shop if this is like their first rodeo like this is their first time doing like social selling or anything like that likely they don't have that network already where then they're just starting from scratch like they're mainly sending out samples they're seeing who's posting videos who's doing well and then they're kind of re-engaging those people they're putting them into a discord group or something like that and just like getting them to post more so if you're already like a brand that's like very used to that you already have the ambassador network like they tend to just shift over and like they can crush it pretty quickly, but like 95 % of brands have, you know, they're still just, they're just doing meta or they're just doing Amazon.

12:51Nik:Yeah. Yeah. I feel like, um, most brands too, that want to get on TikTok shop, they almost just like put it on, uh, they upload the products and then maybe they invite a few affiliates, but then it kind of just sits and, uh, they don't really like aggressively push it. But I think from what I'm gathering, it sounds like you have to pretty aggressively get onboarded on the platform before you can kind of let it coast a little bit. Yeah, 100%. It's very much like a momentum-based platform. And there's definitely an initial investment. Once you are scaled up, then it's harder for sales to drop off.

13:26But in the beginning, it's such a flywheel that you have to start turning. Even if you start it tomorrow, let's say you sent out 50 samples tomorrow. It's going to take three or four days for the creator to get it. TikTok gives them two weeks to post. They post. It takes a week or two for the video to get traction. The video starts getting views. TikTok has no idea who to target, right? Like they're just showing it to people who are watching it. Once you get like a hundred sales, a thousand sales, now it's, now it's not just showing to anybody. It's like, okay, people who bought, you know, your product also bought this product last week.

13:56So let me start showing it to those people who bought, you know, um, a similar product. It starts to target better. Um, but it's just like, it's not getting any of that data until, you know, you're at a hundred orders, a thousand orders, you've sent out you know a thousand samples um by that point it's not like meta where they have like 13 years 15 years longitudinal data right like they know if you bought socks last month you're gonna buy this product um just based on like the ai and data that they have tiktok shops like really been around for just like a few years their their data is a little bit more siloed they take a little bit longer to learn they're looking at it like your sales as they're coming in and then they're kind of making adjustments so it just takes longer but then once it's scaled up is not even about like the sales that you're getting on TikTok shop, just like the amount of brand awareness, the amount of just like cultural significance of being viral on TikTok that can create a huge spillover to Amazon, give you creatives that you can get usage rights, run on meta, do a ton of spend there.

14:51Like there's a ton of just like knock on benefits. Yeah.

14:54Nik:I even remember the early days of TikTok and like products, putting the badge, you know, as seen on TikTok shop or, you know, gone viral on TikTok, like that badge would help increase conversion rate on a website, even if there was no evidence that it did go viral or was big on TikTok. Yeah. It's like the number one, like social proof that you can have these days, right? Like, besides like a celebrity endorsement, which I wouldn't consider like social proof even, but it's just like, you could have like a bunch of five-star reviews. And nowadays people just kind of think that that's like fake you can have like a ton of orders which like tiktok shop it like the order count is like actually accurate it's not like on a website where you can just say like oh 100 000 people bought it or whatever it is uh but once it goes viral on tiktok then like everyone's thinking like oh i gotta have it like this is totally it's like super on trend um so it helps we've even seen like retailers like target um they'll take shelf space and they'll just dedicate it to brands that are viral on tiktok um so we'll give them shelf space like normally you'd have to pay like a pretty good amount for just knowing that like if it's going viral on tiktok and somebody walks in and they recognize the product immediately sell through is going to be better um just philosophy is going to be better and that's what they're looking for right like they're looking for products and brands are just gonna sell through quickly yeah i remember um do you remember that influencer emily marico she used to make the salmon bowl i don't think so but um she went viral for like making this day after day after you cook salmon like salmon and rice bowl.

16:26Nik:And Trader Joe's across the country made a whole section near the front of the store with all the ingredients to make the salmon bowl. And I was like, wow, that's amazing because they don't have to pay her anything. They just basically saw what was kind of trending or like this group of merchandising that worked well. And then they just put that in every store. And like it was, the sell through was amazing. It was right in the front. But I I think that's going to be happening a lot more. And I'm also curious too, like I'm curious to see how retailers are going to be adapting themselves for what's viral on the internet.

17:00Nik:Like we kind of see it a little bit here and there. But a lot of that right now is very pay to play, but I think it's going to flip the other way where the retailers are going to be like, wait a second, forget paying these guys to put their stuff or getting money from the product. Let's create our own sections, merchandise it in a way where we know sell through is going to be way higher and make our own money that way. Yeah, for sure. I think retail is kind of like the boomers of e-commerce where they're always like a little bit slower. Like you could have like a call with the buyer and be like, hey, I'm spending a million a month on Meta.

17:30And they'd be like, okay, that means nothing to me. But nowadays it's starting to change where they're like, oh, okay, cool. Like you're generating all this brand awareness that we don't have to do now, right? But we tell them they're viral on TikTok. We told them a year or two ago, they'd be like, yeah, that's cool. Like, you know, I don't care. Now it's like, oh, okay, that's something that like we're actually considering. and even like we've seen brands like if you go viral on tiktok like everybody's on tiktok whether they're willing to admit it or not it's to some degree the buyer is on tiktok and if they're scrolling through tiktok and it seems like you're everywhere then now they suddenly they want you you're certainly like punching above your weight you actually seem way bigger than you are you could be like just a 5 million a year business a 10 million a year business to them you look like you're a nine-figure year business that they're like why aren't they in walmart yet why aren't day and start.

18:14Yeah.

18:15Nik:A hundred percent. I'm curious your take on a TikTok creative, whether it's TikTok shop, TikTok creators, TikTok ads, do you do much TikTok ad stuff as well? Yeah, we pretty much use GMV max, which is like a feature within TikTok ads where it just takes all of your top performing TikTok shop videos across your videos and creator videos. And it just spends behind what it thinks will do best. So it just kind of automates it and sends it to the videos on shop. But yeah, what we found is like with TikTok creative, it used to be, I mean, it's still pretty different from like what works on other platforms, but also at the same time, like the way that other platforms have started to just copy TikTok where like Instagram reels, Instagram stories, they're all pretty much the same format.

18:59So we've seen brands, like if they have a video that does really well on TikTok shop, there's like a good, like 20, 25 % chance that it'll do well on meta ads as well. So we have a client where their top performing creatives on meta are from TikTok shop because it's like, okay, if it's working on TikTok, pretty good chance of the exact same format, the exact same thing is going to work on Instagram Reels.

19:20Nik:Yeah. Brands like ThirdLove, LiquidIV, and NeuroGum all swear by instant. They've tripled their email revenue and some like Karen Cain even see a 5x increase. Why? Because AI can build hundreds of versions you'll never have time to make. While you're running your brand, Instant is running the experiments, figuring out what works, and then continuously optimizing to keep conversions growing. BFCM's over and your next growth run starts now. Grab a demo by December 31st and get 50 % off your first 60 days at instant.one slash Sharma. Yeah, I feel like that's so true. I remember even with a tequila brand a couple years ago, like the best TikTok ad had the highest click-through rate on Facebook and Instagram.

20:07Nik:And we were just like, I mean, it makes sense, especially for a beverage product. It demonstrates it. You can see the reaction. You can see how it looks. But yeah, I feel like there's going to be a lot more just carryover of that kind of more native feeling creative of like what's native in the palm of your hand versus on Meta tends to be a lot of more studio shot stuff or pretty stuff, things that are highly edited. What about when it comes to creators and maybe even live? Like, how do you think about creative direction there when it comes to creators? Are you one on the side of like, let's let them figure out the product and talk about it, or let's give them some guidance, or let's give them a script?

20:48Nik:One thing we used to do is we would give like a bullet point as a brief. So like, hey, for your intro, make sure you touch on these three. for your main talking points, make sure you hit these points. And for your closeout thoughts, you know, hit these. And then we can, we would usually take that and mix and match a bunch of the different bullet points. Yeah. A hundred percent. I think with TikTok, it's a little bit different because it's like for TikTok shop, a lot of times you're just sending them the sample. You're not paying them upfront. Like if you go on some UGC marketplace and you're paying someone a hundred dollars for video, you can be pretty strict on like what you want in the brief.

21:21And if they don't meet what's in the brief, it's like, Hey, you're not getting paid. You're in you get revisions and things like that but tiktok shop if you send them a sample there's no revisions they're really just getting a free product like maybe it's a 20 dollar product and they know it's probably costing you five or six bucks it's probably not going to be something that they spend like three hours making um but at the same time it's like you still want to give them some direction typically what we do instead of like writing like a two-page brief a three-page brief you're you're definitely in the right ballpark and like what we do in terms of like a bullet point um but what we find like even more powerful it's like sending just example videos because if you're a tiktok creator and this is pretty much everyone these days like they're not really reading nobody wants to read a big paragraph of text or something but everyone on the platform who's a tiktok creator watches tiktok videos so if you send them like three videos i've done really well for you perfect they can watch all three they get some inspiration they put their own twist on it kind of going back to where you're saying like in meta it's like a five ten percent hit rate that when TikTok shop is much lower, it's like you're just paying them like, you know, the cost of product, it's like 10, 20 bucks.

22:22So like on a dollar basis, you're probably getting the same hit rate, but you're going to get a lot of people who just get the product. Maybe they just want the free product. Maybe they do like an unboxing that's like kind of lazy or they do like a video that you're not super happy with. But at the same time, it's just like a volume play. Like, you know, you get five videos for the cost of whatever it costs for one off of a marketplace. If one out of five just does a really good job, you're probably gonna be happy.

22:46Nik:Yeah, totally. And then how do you think about creative and the actual TikTok shop listing? So within the listing, it's kind of the same thing where it's like, we're not really worried about like the words that are in like the product description. Most people aren't gonna read that. What we really want to do is just have really good images, like at least six or seven really solid images, all serving like a different purpose. There should be one that's just like very well branded. It can have some call outs, like you mentioned, And like TikTok is just way more lenient than Amazon on them. So you can say like number one best selling, you can like whatever badge you want to put on there.

23:19It's much easier than Amazon. A couple pictures of it being used or it's just more of a lifestyle shot. And then if you have a video in the listing, that's great as well. Like, you know, kind of your top video or like a customer demonstrating it, how it looks in the real world, how it looks in real life. That's kind of how we think about it. So we just really want to maximize the images and video descriptions a little bit less important. People aren't reading that as much.

23:41Nik:yeah i i find have you ever seen like neuro gums tiktok shop imagery i feel like those are some of the best neuro gum or even there's another one medicube um they have very like infographic driven imagery yeah neuro gum is a great example kind of going back to what you're saying in terms like the ambassador program that's really how they've been thinking about it it's like they don't think of it as like oh these are creators we send them a product and they make a post and then like we forget about them it's like no we want these people to be like ambassadors of a brand we want them to love the brand they probably have like one of the stronger discord communities um and they really because it's kind of a it's more of a commoditized product it's just it's like gum with like caffeine in it there's a lot of caffeine infused products there's a lot of different energy drinks like it's a pretty tough market um yeah and it's not like it's a super you know unique like ingredient list but they've just really figured out that marketing and really figured out how to get creators to like really care about the brand yeah i think they're also just a good example of like you know on meta you really need to pump aov to make it work and on tiktok shop if you've got good product channel fit you can kind of rip regardless of aov yeah you're typically not going to get a super high aov it's like young people they're looking for a deal they're looking for like a 20 30 product um but you can get great all tv it's like kind of tiktok shop is like your way of introducing people to the brand the ones they've tried neuro gum once they really like the product they're going to come back whether it's on amazon on your website, wherever that they can find it.

25:07That's when they're going to come back. So you really want to focus on like kind of the intro, almost sample pack, really small size that they can try for 20 bucks. And then if the product's good, then you're confident that you're going to get that repeat rate.