$250K On TikTok Shop in 3 Weeks?! | SSP #532

today we've got a married couple with an incredible story and not even their first full year on Amazon they've grossed over half a million dollars and in not even their first full month on Tik Tock shop they've gross over a quarter of a million dollars and they're going to share how it's possible to set up a Tik Tock shop account in only 10 minutes how cool is that pretty cool I [Music] think are you browsing a Shopify Walmart Etsy Alibaba or Pinterest page and maybe you see a cool product that you want to get some

more data on well while you're on those pages you can actually use the helium 10 Chrome extension demand analyzer to get instant data about what's happening on Amazon for those keywords on these other websites or maybe you want to then follow up and get an actual supplier quote from a company on alibaba.com in order to see if you can get this product produced you can do that also with the helium 10 demand analyzer both of these are part of the helium 10 Chrome extension which you can download for free at h10 domme for/ extension hello

everybody and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by helium 10 I'm your host Bradley Sut and this is the show that's a completely bs-free unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce World we've got a husband and wife Dynamic serious seller d here for the first time on the show the uh Double J crew uh Josh and Jenna how's it going guys going pretty well thanks for having us yeah awesome now where are you guys located we are right outside Philly okay so you're

you're on the East Coast all right and is that where you guys were were born and raised or you transplants from somewhere else so we well I'm a transplant he is born and raised out here I'm originally from the Midwest the subers of Chicago in West Philadelphia born and raised oh sorry y brought me back yes yeah oh she could sing it with you the whole thing oh yes I could um yeah know we we met in college out here and I kind of fell in love with the East Coast so we knew we wanted

to raise our kids out here so yeah then we end you fell in love with him and then you fell in love with the eastco okay but right yes okay in that in that in that order there uh what college did you guys uh meet we went to Nova Villanova villain NOA okay yes um I knew um one of my favorite Clippers uh was uh Carri KD way back in the '90s went 85 here they won yeah yeah y yep so um the reason I know him is funny is here's here's just a really crazy

story you guys may or may not know I used to be a Zumba Fitness influencer and and my Channel that I created on Zoom that had you know 30 million views it was called crazy sock TV and I created that is kind of like a branding kind of thing I wanted to be memorable um so that people remember is my brand and just not to be some random person dancing Zumba which well there's a million people so what I would do is I would have a crazy like one sock on one leg and then one

sock on an arm and that was what I came up with it was always a crazy sock but where I originally got that idea was was Carrie K he would just have one sock he would play with uh when he played with the Clippers which is which is my team and I'm like that is the most weirdest thing I've ever seen uh I'm I'm going to roll with that idea and that went to tens of millions of of of Zumba video uh views and so yeah that's my Villanova uh villain NOA tie right there anyways

all right so you guys what what did each of you uh major in um there my bachelor was in marketing and he was Finance math and finance yeah I mean he took everything for fun math he loves math so like that my my fun classes were like astronomy and his were I don't know derivatives and anything he could with math what did you guys do after graduation then did you either of you enter into that world that you you guys were uh studying we did we did a little bit um so I did marketing for

my dad's financial planning firm and then um I decided I wanted to be a teacher so I went back I got my Master's of Education went down that route um and then we were actually living in Chicago for the beginning of our first four years yeah um and then we had our Twins and moved back out to the east coast and I definitely took a good break there um for the better part of a decade and didn't really jump back into anything until like until this I mean not really fully into anything until this and

and then and then Josh what were you doing all this all this time I'm assuming you were the income then if she was taking a break so what were you doing yep all sorts of things in finance Consulting working too many hours a week flying 100,000 miles a year like domestically only which you you probably fly that in four trips but around the world domestically that's a t a harder Target to hit so yeah it doesn't sound like an exciting job so what what was the thought process on like how you guys ended up with

e-commerce was it just like all right I don't want to do this always or were you looking for a side hustle or or how do you go from the finance and marketing world to and the stay-at-home you know world to switch to e-commerce so I mean that was definitely part of it the the time constraints and I think the um idea that there could be some passive component to Ecom was interesting but really was I mean Josh knows I would I was admiring Ecom for like the better part of a decade I was that person

that everything I looked at I was like oh I could create this I can make it better um even with educational stuff and and tools and resources I was making my own and and kind of like just admiring it from afar and saying you know when it's the right time then then I'll go into it because we are not like the dipy toe in type of people we are like the 50 Foot Cannonball jump all in it's not like we're just going to try you know like a product and see how it goes when we

I knew when we were going to go in it was going to be all in so um I was waiting for life to slow down and it was really like actually the craziest busiest time of our life and I kind of just had this like Epiphany that life doesn't really slow down no matter how old your kids get um so if I don't do it now it's probably now or never and I mean I can I can remember I think it was like a month after we got out of the hospital with my son so

our oldest son has epilepsy and he had about a year of failed anti-seizure meds and treat treatments and it was just in and out of the hospital and they eventually came out so they have this all over the country but it's the medical ketogenic diet for epilepsy so they put him on that and we had to go to the hospital and we had to learn all about it and I kind of had this moment of I was like this is more intense and exhausting than twins this has been my dream forever I'm like if I

don't jump in now I'm never going to do it well was there something that made you that's still not a natural thing to just like jump into like like did you get hit with an ad somewhere or were you search how to make money at home or or how did you land on Ecom so I definitely found a couple ads there because there were I did take a couple courses that were teaching you how you can sell on Amazon um and I had already had ideas and I kind of thought selling an Amazon I I

didn't understand the process of it so I was like all right so I think I can figure this out there's courses to do it so I took the courses I downloaded like a ton of podcasts and he knew I kind of like dug into this hole of like just learning and education and I didn't want to bring it to him until I was like I can you're doing great yeah you're like you're doing great you're doing your own thing like like I said we're not like a dipy toe type of person I didn't want to

bring it to him until I thought this is something he would like to so I really just kind of like dug in in the courses and I already knew the things I wanted to create but I didn't understand like the science the research behind it um and it's funny we were talking about this I was like okay so I listened to your series sellers podcast before I could understand 10% of what you said um and I remember like listening to one of your podcasts and a few others like it and I was like this is

amazing this part I don't understand creating design Innovation I understand the numbers what year we talking by the way about more or less 2019 2020 2021 last year fall of2222 yeah fall 22 yeah yeah so I listened to one of your episodes and a couple others and I was like oh my goodness Josh would love this there's software there's resarch there's numbers that can go into this so basically I hooked him by showing him that kind of stuff I was like look if you can do the product research and you can tell me the numbers

and you can do this I will Design and create the products and look they have software like helium 10 he was like lit up he's like this is fantastic I can play I mean he was playing around in it before we even had our first product like that we were yeah like before we even really knew if we were going to do a product yet um and now I'm like now we're here what happened yeah so I hooked him with that kind of stuff we're very different very different and in terms of like our interest

and what we like and I think it actually helps in this industry so um yeah that's I knew I wanted to for a long time I don't think he knew he wanted to until he saw that aspect of the business that I could kind of hook him in so at this time you still weren't working yourself only only Josh was I've done a lot of things on the side like I would just say side jobs and stuff like you know I've done network marketing and coaching and stuff like that um coaching Sports sorry yeah what

sport did you coach uh volleyball I played volleyball in college so I just coached here and there whenever I could camps and helped out schools and stuff but you had you had the the kind of bandwidth but but but Josh you know you know traveling everything if it was up to him it probably might not have gotten done because he was pretty busy then so that's an important thing to know like hey maybe it's the husband maybe it's a wife but but uh you know you got to have somebody who's able to dedicate some time

to this or else you might never get uh started so then you guys you know started dipping yourselves into to courses and now the very first product that you launched uh are you still selling that product now yeah the well I mean it's of our FBA product we have yeah we have we launched our first ones for KDP books and then our first product we launched last summer wait talk talk about that for a second what what made you what made you go that route so KDP I mean well it's inexpensive and I already was

creating designs and and things like that and I knew that was something that we could do while we're learning because we wanted to when we wanted to launch products we knew that we wanted to launch more than at a time and we wanted to make sure we had the research into it and we knew they were going to take a while especially coming up to you know the timing of the year that we were looking at sourcing products was a little tricky it was January right yeah it was Dean a year ago was when we

launched our first KDP book in February of last year and it was really based on she knew the audience that she wanted to serve but we had to test the content and we felt like KDP was a good place to test the content of like a meal planner and fitness type trackers and and then on the education side cursive workbooks and you know things of that nature because when you look at the you know audience that she wanted to serve my research coming out of it was trying to find you know products that interested or

that um that audience wanted at the time and so that's why we used KDP as we got to kind of test content and then we also got to test PBC play with it and learn it and in a in a real experimental way instead of with an FBA product that was going to require a you know a large upfront investment in inventory and all that kind of stuff and we had started that process but it takes a while so but basically you use a lot of the similar strategies like using helium 10 to see demand

and and that's how you like landed on what KDP thing you were going to uh uh launch and and how to optimize your listing things like that yep MH okay and the now at what then where you're like hey no I want to do physical products so some of our designs that went into the KDP books are actually used in our physical products um we edited them made them a little bit better we were able to use some reviews so for example we have a meal planner Fitness tracker or I think we called it the

advanced meal planner um and fitness tracker in KDP um and then we were able to make some improvements on that to make it into one of our vegan leather planners um but yeah so like we those designs took me a lot of time to focus on and creating those um so we just had to make some adjustments to make those doable and we were able to get samples and stuff as we put out that KDP book we were getting samples because we knew we wanted to eventually make it in FBA we knew that there was

more money obviously in FBA than KDP were you able to do things by going you know directly to somebody who actually physically produced this that was not an option with KDP like a certain kind of cover or something like that that you just literally could not even do KDP uh what are some of those things the KDP books you can only do paperback or hard cover you can have limited size um and as you know with FBA you can do anything you want really I mean you can create any material cover um things in our

meal planter Fitness tracker one of the things that I wanted was that they could tear off their grocery list and take it with them you can't have perforated pages in a KDP book um and it's also I think where you can get seen on KDP versus your you're shown everywhere on Amazon right and isn't KDP I believe it's just the books that you're shown in yeah you you're shown in you're shown in search to an extent but it's an ISBN identified product not an as not a traditional like as uh product so yeah you're definitely

limited as to where you show up do you use it kind of like as a like a incubator almost for some of your FBA like if it really takes off with KDP then that's what you maybe double down on and make a physical uh copy I I will say yes and our most successful product which we launched in December that that most recently um you know fortunately exploded on like Tik Tock and and such is really a culmination of like a case study in that it's a handwriting set of handwriting workbooks that have disappearing ink

and such and most of that content you know she built over time and we released in a variety of different like KDP workbooks while she was you know we kind of in always in mind had man it would be great to do this one thing the keyword always looked great there were so many things about it that we felt like we could improve and we were so excited about it but we knew it would take a lot of time and KD P's content kind of feeling and seeing how things worked was really a huge part

of the design over like a 9mon period before we released those in December and we're still using our KDP designs into new things we have our our newest product coming out the Bible verse mapping that we're working on getting those out by Spring and they were in KDP and now we're able to get those and a linen cover a different thing for um for spring for FBA products too what's your what's your average retail price on the KDP side and then of those how much do you take home well our average every one of our

products on KDP is $9.99 except for the homeschool planner which is $4.99 and on the products that are n call it $10 on the products that are $10 we take home about $260 um a sale and then on the homeschool planner we take home about $3 and 80 cents 90 cents give or take and then are you doing PBC for this at all or or it's just all organic yeah we do um I think our total PBC spend on KDP is about $15 a day maybe um so it's it's small obviously it's all relative but

um but that, 15600 a month is net of you know PBC charges specifically so it's a pretty low AC cost process as long as you don't get sucked into chasing physical products if you stay in your lane recognize that you're a KDP product and not try to go after FBA products not that I ever tried that um then you you can you can do fine it's separate log on for KDP and your Seller Central because that that's kind of like a different it's not Seller Central I know but how different is the interface for advertising

I've never you I know shavali you know probably knows this but I've never done advertising for for KDP uh is it very similar like you know you can do you know phrase match and and sponsor campaigns or almost okay okay cool um were you selling the entirety of 2023 or did you start later not January KDP our first one was February and then our second one was like April and then our first FBA product was July 1 okay so not a full year of KDP not a full year obviously of FBA what would you say

if you were to combine the gross sales of both on Amazon only for for your planners and and things uh What uh what would you say it was total at the end of end of the year in the past year since since well we haven't been out a year but yeah yeah okay so total um about 400,000 are you still doing your your day job or did you at some point last year go all in on the Ecom uh Josh yeah no no it took about like eight days to realized that there's no chance I

was going to not be able to to like go all in into this it was too much fun yeah you and and the hours you worked and the time you worked I mean I mean not to say that you don't right now where as we're starting everything up but uh yeah I mean we're trying to launch a good amount of stuff it's a lot different being on a plane 100,000 miles a year than it is being you know up late at night talking with with manufacturers or something but still in your own house it's a

little different was this your first year in a few years that you you didn't make your high status on your your travel uh I I absolutely probably second year it was second year but it was the first year I haven't been on an airplane in like my entire life really yeah when was I mean I guess so yeah no we've really because after covid we actually started driving everywhere like if we went somewhere kids love it too the kids like it and and frankly it's fun for the two of us and the things we like

to do I mean we we love to go to the mountains and Snowboard they're all close enough here the ocean the beach all that stuff is is driving distance from here which growing up in the midwest that's that's not possible so I love that we can just get to anything within a couple hours by the way it was great great story we're in the Midwest and after school and she's like oh we you can snowboard here and I was like awesome where and we she's like I'll take you this place and we're driving and the

nav you know those old TomTom things right is like this is when we lived in Chicago right after we got married two miles you're at your destination and I'm like Jen I can see about 15 miles in any direction right now there is nowhere to actually you I don't believe I like kind of I want to believe you it's not so much snowboarding in the midwest as it is like a downward Hill you know yeah I was like this is like a sled Hill somewhere that we could turn into yeah so yeah we we like

the mountains out here yeah we don't got much of that here exactly in my town where I live few miles from the beach here in California but um all right now at what point did you guys discover um Tik Tok shop one of your serious seller podcasts in the uh in the fall um you had on a create some a Creator who did a video a viral a video that went viral for um I think one of Lizzy's products um but I forget exactly which one it was might have been the bodysuit um one of

them but but you had someone on that was explaining kind of some how some of it worked and it was super intriguing and then we went to the meeting in New York where Lizzie spoke and Jenna drove home you from New York City and I set up the I set up our Tic Tac shop in the car on on the Hotpot what they're talking about by the way is we have um they're helium 10 Elite members and we have a quarterly inperson workshop for helium 10 Elite members and we did one in New York and

we brought somebody Elizabeth who's been on the podcast before talking about Tik Tok shop and and she kind of broke down exactly what she did and I remember you guys at that it was like light bulbs were were going off in your head as you guys were watching like wait wait a minute we've got a perfect kind of product that would do well on Tik Tok shop so then you got home or you said on the way home not even you weren't even home yet you're already setting it up on the way home in the

car I in the car cuz the kids were with my with their my parents their grand k for a couple days but you like literally on the drive I mean what is it it's less than 3 hours from New York C it's a couple hours he was done by the time we got back he's like we're set up let's go I was like are you kidding me now at what point there were you like oh man we're on to something like what was your first kind of like viral day or frankly Christmas was our first

viral day on Christmas day you know my I had alerts on like sale alerts on Tik Tok cuz we didn't get too many before that so we had sales but not compared to Amazon and so our phone I'm like it's Christmas Leave Me Alone who is bothering me and I was like not that many family and friends are trying to say Merry Christmas and so it was sales and we had no idea what was going on and it was a you know video that was about 10 seconds long that someone had posted that had picked

up and had you know half a million views that day and a million by the next and the following day sold us out of our meal planners uh it was uh about 500 on Tik Tok and about 800 on Amazon so at that point sold out two days yeah it generated more Amazon sales than Tik Tock shop even though it was from Tik Tock shop for that first product yeah as well as our website so you didn't have like a link it was just like it got sold out and then people were just trying to

search for it on Amazon uh you know to try and get and they found your product through there yep and our website yeah and we found where they found it was be um banner ads like sponsored display ads because they recognized the product so if they would search for something meal planner Fitness or whatever our banner ads had like a you know 6% AC cost I remember we were looking at them and I was like oh that's what like they didn't necessarily know what to search CU I didn't really think about it at the time

we just had the title as graceful by Design meal planner finish tracker or something whereas all the conversions PPC were happening from there and that's when we kind of realized you know there's something to this to your point about your question about when did we realize like this was a thing when we realized how well these markets could play off each other and help each other that was when that day Christmas and the day after is when I was like oh yeah oh wow like this is this is a thing I think you were pretty

excited about it pretty early though yeah I was excited I'm the pessimist I was the one that was like I don't know I mean we're we're still we just had our second product go viral even more so and I'm still like I don't know if should we get the inventory is it going to repeat yeah it probably won't work so now the the planners on Amazon this is not this wasn't your KDP this was a physical one so what's the retail price on these on on Amazon 1999 um it was 1999 and then so what

kind of profit margin on Amazon um actually before PPC about 50% um so they're 240 landed plus small stand we we made sure that packaged they're 74 in thick so that we can fit in small standard so basically about a 50% or shade above 50% margin and then with with PBC with PBC uh like if you take launch and everything into consideration the first you know three four months which was the end of last year where you know we had 20% net margins on including launch so about about 20% probably probably more you know if

we're not considering launch in there now yeah now if what kind of retail price did you have it on uh Tik Tok shop did you still keep it at $1 19999 or did you take advantage of how you can just add shipping and and and and Tik Tok pays for it or at least they were before yeah so so we did not do that where we lower the price because so Tik Tock shop for uh sellers who use seller shipping which is what we were doing um because we are fulfilling some of it from our

Amazon inventory for ex or all of it from our Amazon inventory that if you spent $20 as a customer they would pay for shipping uh Tik Tock shop meaning so the CL the customer would get it for free for shipping and then Tik Tock shop would reimburse us and basically the 7 99 is like for one item quantity of one is what they would do so we would make the product $20 and shipping $7.99 and as long as we do that the customer doesn't pay shipping and we get the $20 and reimbursed for shipping at

$7.99 so 2 so so on Amazon let's say that you were taking home you know after PBC and stuff you know like let's say six six bucks or or something like that you know maybe $5 $6 or or so which is which is pretty decent on Amazon not many people can say that uh but then for that same order on Tik Tok shop how much money were you taking due to Tik Tok like subsidizing your your fees and and all this other stuff yep so basically to break it down so we would get the 20

minus the 20% commission that went to that Creator right so we would get 16 for the product plus the $7.99 for the shipping re urement so $23.99 that we would receive and Tik Tok pays the influencer directly we don't have to do all that accounting thank goodness nice so $23.99 that we would receive it's 240 landed and our mcf fee to like ship and deliver an item to a customer is $8 and and change but eight call it $8 so $23.99 in and um around $11.50 out so double plus you're D yeah double or more

the profit margin for the exact same product on Tik Tok shop now what's this Jenna are you doing some kind of like are you the influencer for your own product too like are you doing like lives or or or videos or or some or am I getting you guys confused with somebody else no no that's yeah I mean I do it I do it um it's you know I really more so Ian they had different promotions that they were running that you could get ad credits for doing lives that's why I I don't think I

get a lot of traffic and that's really not in my opinion where we get a large amount of salale the sales I mean especially with our group books that sold out that was all because of videos and influencers so it gave us ad credits which was great um but personally I'm not I do it for the business but I I'm not a fan of of being in front of the camera anymore that I need to but I was all for you know starting up a small business when they were like I think it was like

$1,500 in ad credits I was like I'll do it let's do it let's you know that's what it was no you're right during December if you went live you know a certain amount of time and spent 1,500 they would give you 1500 in ad credit and so we basically did did that and the day the promotion ended they deposited 15 like they were exactly as they said it would be and she was tortured every minute that she was live so I would never classify myself as an influencer i that's what I love about Tik Tok

shop that you can use the professionals that that do that as your influencers okay so now you guys I mean technically if if you know Christmas was was around um you know was around where you really started taking off um you know by and the time that we're recording this podcast um you know maybe like you can talk about your first full month of Tik Tock shop what were the gross sales on that platform since if you include Christmas in that time um they're $250,000 on just Tik Tok in one week or one week uh

in one in one month in one month in 13 or 72h hour period they were $180,000 that was that Groove Books viral video which was crazy and it's amazing to me still because we had a few large influencers that were like you know half a million followers and I'm like I was The Optimist for those I'm like this is going to be the one and they did great videos and the video that took off that's what like N9 million views now I don't know she had I think just under 40,000 which is still big but

it's not like the half million or you know near a million followers that we had other people so you just don't know I and I mean the video was good so the fact that you guys did a 250 or quarter of a million does that mean that your influencers took home like 50 Grand themselves for doing videos that that influencer specifically um generated uh yeah single mom she's like the nicest person and we were so happy because she sent a message you know that the commission was like she was ready to get to be done

with this and she generated her uh it was 30,000 and change in commission income that she generated based on her post and that just like that's again when further it has furthered this point of like you don't have to be the influencer because you know Jenna can be Jenna and talk to the influencers which again we try to do like on it like we write s to them when they make content like all of those types of things and then it's so much more natural and the creators love doing posts on Jenna's products because she

can relate to them and she cares like she genuinely cares and it was so cool to see that from a couple of the moms that have had really successful posts on our products that you just sit there and you're like this is a great great business model that even though they're increasing Tik Tock shop increasing their referral fees no problem worth every penny y you guys have some hijackers on some of your you must have be out of stock or something you guys know about that I'm just looking at your store right now yep all

right you guys need to take care of that do some test those KCK those guys off or something do you mind if I show people your your product page here all right let me um they're the worst because the shipping is like weeks and weeks and weeks so we ordered it right away it's killing I mean the fact you know that that's when you that by the way that that's when it's like you know until you get it fixed you know where you might want to like suppress your listing um where you take out the

images and then nobody can sell on it you know so that you know you're every day that somebody has it active you're like losing your your keyword Rank and your conversion rate and stuff like that so so so if you don't think you're going to fix that right away you know try and get your listening suppressed somehow you know taking out the images doing something I I said this is where you're always learning in this space because these are problems that you didn't know would be problems inventory man didn't know a problem all of sudden

it was a so it's been great to have resources and help from people like uh you know helium tenal folks and other folks in the space which is such a help because you're going through for the first time so then going back to your main product which is in stock here uh this is the main one that you sell on Tik Tok as well right and the ones that that went viral before it was the first one that went viral um it's not the largest selling of our products anymore but it's the second and it

was the one that was here first this product released in August yeah August did this originally start as KDP or this was a from from yep no we did a version of this via KDP which if yeah Jenna's author page is like Amazon.com author Jenna Coleman and that's where KDP stuff is and there's a there's a it's called like the advanced meal the advanced weekly meal planner yep but yeah we reached a BSR of like two and then it all went out of stock all right so then this you know and then this is this

is what you also have on your um Tik Tok page and so doing some cool numbers all right so so you you showed me the other day like there is a for anybody who has a an Amazon account and a Shopify account they can literally start Tik Tock shop within like what 20 minutes would you say or less or yeah I mean we've had some people that have taken time to like if they have a soul prop like where they don't have a business in some ways like where they don't have an EIN or some

things there's been some people that has taken some time but Tik tok's due diligence on you as a company the Shopify system seems to um serve as enough validation for Tik Tok shop that they're good to go and you get set up pretty quick with a shop and then an ad account on the business side and then then it pulls from their Amazon inventory so I you know I you guys don't have a way to share your screen but maybe you can just verbally um walk through those steps so somebody has their Amazon account and

then do they need to have the Shopify account already tied to their Amazon through like uh buy with prime yeah uh so okay so good question but not buy with prime for fulfilling on Tik Tock shop buy with prime can be used on your actual Shopify website like if you have your website on Shopify but you don't actually need a website to do the Tik Tock Shopify Amazon integration as long as you have the program Shopify there's two sides to it there's the Tik Tok side and there is a native app in other words Tik

Tock shop has built an app that sits on shopify's uh interface so you can download on Shopify the Tik Tock app that allows you to create your shop and create your business center and ads manager right so all from Shopify to Tik Tock shop so it can push to Tik Tok and then um if you have like a personal Tik Tok account it can link that to your store and convert it to a business account basically in Shopify where do they go in Shopify if they have their Shopify account they got their Amazon account what's

the if they're not tied together how do you uh do they need to get it from the Amazon app store the the Shopify app from the Amazon app store to to tie it to the Shopify account in the Shopify App Store there is a Tik Tock app and an Amazon mcf app they need both okay so you do it through Shopify instead of uh Amazon you do it in the middle yeah and then the Amazon mcf app is what pulls from Amazon and all they do really there is they have to sync up the skew

right to make sure that the skew in Shopify matches the one in Amazon which the app will say you're good and then that your shipping map so if you say standard shipping defaults to mcf standard if you've ever done an MC if the person has done an mcf order then it will say okay when an order comes in and you fulfill it it's going to fulfill via whichever mcf option standard option so that way Tik Tock shop syncs immediately to Shopify Shopify pulls inventory and ships it and then Shopify gives the tracking number back to

Tik Tock shop and then when you when you you know set up your Tik Tok shop um from your Shopify and if your Shopify is already pulling in your Amazon um you know images and things like that the Shopify site it publishes all your images and and description and stuff to Tik Tok shop right yep wow so so guys this this is not this is not rocket science where you have to know coding and and a bunch of crazy things in order to get up and running but at the same time it's not something that

hey you just turn it on and you make a quarter of a million dollars um you know in in a month it it require you know it's heavily on on influencers so so what's what's your your guys best suggestions of somebody's just setting up they do everything you just said until now they've got their Amazon store now they got their Shopify set up now they set up their Tik Tok shop pulling it's all tied to Shopify and tied to to Amazon how do I get eyeballs in front of my product the two biggest recommendations we

would say is that so I'll let her say on our account what we should have because there are some things that you should have on your account when an influencer looks you up it's kind of like having a website if they go to your shop and you don't have any posts or anything so I'll let her cover that but on the B on the flip side on the affiliate side you know you can go into the affiliate dashboard right inside Tik Tock shop and you have IM you know immediate direct access to creators and that

is really where you can do 50 at a time where you can reach out to you can create a message select a product that you want to offer them a commission to promote and they'll receive your DM right in their affiliate dashboard that's invites them to promote that product and so being able to get in there and send 50 of those a day to to reach out to folks that are relevant to at least your audience um and be careful not just going after huge you know creators um you're able to see how each Creator

does you're able to see their sales their engagement all that kind of stuff and you can go and directly reach out and just use the hard hard work method instead of the you know blast or spend money just throwing you know money to build your awareness you can do just manual reach outs but then on our page so I I would say I think in the beginning no matter what it's hard to get influencers to talk to you because you haven't had any product sales right they can see how much so I think it's really

important to focus on connecting with them and I think a lot of influencers when they're sharing a product they don't just want to know what it is and how much it is they want to know the story behind it so a lot of the ones that we connected with especially some of the bigger influencers where they have plenty of options of what to share they kind of want to know the story behind your product and a lot of people love to know when there is a small business owner behind it why did you create it

who are you what what went into this and that helps and connecting in the story so a lot of them use that I've connected with the fact that I'm I'm a homeschool parent and a lot of them are homeschool parents in terms of some of the educational stuff or um other ones I've connected with I'm a former public school teacher too and they connected the fact that we you know that we were both Educators um some of it is Mom life and connecting with you know busy meal planning and just connecting in different ways so

if you're just honest about your story sometimes it's the things that surprised me that we had connections on that they were like wow that's really cool I also have a kid you know on with allergies on a specific diet that you know I saw you know you created a meal planner or something and and so different ways to connect the making of your products and and sharing in those like I try to do reals a little bit on that um and sometimes that will help because I think when they're considering they go through and see

some of your reels that you've created not just your products they don't just go to your storefront I will notice they'll sometimes like my reels and my reels don't have many views a lot of them have like you know like a hundred a couple 100 but the influencers will go and check to see you know like and sometimes I'll talk about why I made the product the way I did or the features of it um so I really tried to push on that in the beginning because I think that helped connect with influencers but then

once you do have a product that goes viral and they see that you you know you have a business that could help them as well then they come to you but it doesn't start that way then they come to you right so now it's different which is nice but I would say in the beginning the pessimist in me I was like oh my goodness how are we ever going to like get them to come to us or like we're small business that haven't proven that we can make but it really does yeah it does change

when you go into that portal you know there's probably 100,000 influencers a million influen whatever in there how are you picking and choosing those 50 that you want to reach out to First really the same way that I think they're choosing us like I I try to find people that connect with our brand so when they're talking about educational stuff or their kids or I see that they have an interest in in in recipes and cooking and things like that we try to find ways that are natural connection so um that's part of it but

because you can search by interest yes so so in the affiliate dashboard you can search by interest right and then and then you know that's the really cool part about it you to have that background view into people that that are going to be sharing your products you can like go see what they're all about on their page so it doesn't take long but you know we usually spend time checking out their page before we even message someone all right now now before we get into you know some some just quick hitting strategies from you

guys um if people want to reach out to you I mean they they can obviously see your your brand and I just showed it you know graceful by Design but if people want to reach out to you guys for more questions or help uh with either Tik Tok or or KDP or any of your Specialties how can they find you guys on the interwebs out there the interwebs I would say the best place is uh you know Jenna Jenna graceful byd design.com I do check Ong graceful bydesign for Tik Tok um or Instagram it's atg

graceful by Design LLC um but either one of those I do check the messaging in there but yeah it is uh let let's go ahead and get into your your your your 60-second tip or 60-second strategy uh you know maybe maybe one each give us any strategy that you think will be beneficial to our uh listeners I'm going to do a quick strategy on folks who are newer or who are getting into maybe wanting to get into this space in case someone like that is watching um because this has been you know a real thing

for us over the past year from you know building this together and I would say that the the biggest thing in Ecom is that you have to remember is that cash flow timing and the business right the real business aspects of any business hold true in Ecom right so cash flow timing when you're thinking about getting into a business and you see you know again some of the courses out there that just say you know things are easy and things are this and you can make money quickly and all those types of things I just

would would say that uh from a cautionary perspective that you know remember this is a business that costs money and and when you sell more on something like Amazon or Tik Tock shop you need more reserves that they hold and you have to spend more on inventory and so and so those that's just like a fundamental business practice that I wanted to make sure you know we said is that it's not a you know fairy tale industry it's a it's a hard work you know business real business and I feel like that gets blushed over

a little bit with a lot of the things that are out there so that that's just in general a principle and uh and then my my less way less than 60c tip is that you know your your biggest strength still is your brand and to build a strategy today without a brand I think is just challenging because then you can just be you so when you're reaching out to influencers or you're designing product you can really actually relate to it in addition to it being good research and all that kind of stuff because people know

whether you care about what it is that you're selling or making well this is it's it's been really great to see your journey you know from just learning about about Tik Tok shop at that conference and then you know selling out and then and then guys nobody can hire me just out there so I don't have any website or anything but they're now my customers for for my family running three PS cuz uh I have a warehouse here and I found out that they were they were struggling with shipping so I'm like hey let me

take your your your planners here and let me have my family help you guys ship so they're shipping you know 20 30 of these planners all the time so like it's a it's really cool to firsthand see see your growth and uh and now you know you're you're putting food on the table of that one influencer well now now now you're you're employing my family as well so they you're changing lives here left and right I'm sure you're changing lives with uh people who have listened to this episode learning about the potential uh on KDP

um with uh Tik Tok shop as well so we'll definitely want to you know reach back out to you guys next uh next year and see how you know we just got with you on your first full month of Tik Tok shop let's see what happens after a full year of Amazon and and Tik Tok shop you guys will be uh probably have some cool stories to to share so thank you so much for joining us