How To Sell on TikTok Shop with NO Inventory ($0 Startup)

today I'm going to walk you through how to build a successful Tik Tok shop we're going to talk about products best practices how to do the marketing how to get reviews how to scale and a lot of good stuff now not only have I been in the e-commerce space for over eight years we've done tens of millions in sales a lot of that being on Shopify running paid ads we've also done a lot here on multiple Tik Tok shops this is my newest one that I launched just after q1 we started like April is really

when the sales first started coming in it's done about $100,000 so far it's become very consistent very profitable and this brand teaser coming soon also does another 30,000 maybe 25,000 a month between Shopify and Amazon already we just launched those so what I really want to share with you today is help you understand why we start on Tik talk shop and it's become such a successful Launchpad I run a pretty large consulting company we've had for about six years and we help people mostly scale but a lot of people start and what we've been recommending

to people is use Tik Tok as a Launchpad if you're trying to build a brand prove your cont concept there and then you can go out to other marketing streams we've even had clients do $2 million a month where like I'm directly in there running their ads yes so you've had quite some crazy success stories but what I want to show you today is is Tik Tok shop specifically because this opportunity is just crazy and a lot of other people are doing it so these are people inside of our group to $10,000 days back toback

65% margin you can't really get that stuff on Facebook ads right hitting the first almost 1K days $900 there's a whole flywheel here with momentum and I'm going to show you how to activate that flywheel to get this working for you so step one is going to be getting the product to sell the reason I'm starting with this over any other thing nothing happens until you have something to sell and my famous line with Tik Tok shop is the fastest way to get results is to go slow when it comes to selecting your product why

because often times you have to get inventory or there's like more setup involved you need graphic design it's not slapped together some Drop Shipping Store and be live the same day so because of that there's so much setup you want to kind of make sure what you're doing on the first go around works so let's talk about products there's three ways you can get your product you can order inventory okay for a stock product that exists on alib bab or whatever something that you're not creating you can manufacture your own product dude this could be

anything hats supplements I have a supplement brand that does really well uh you can manufacture your own stuff okay and there's pros and cons to all of these and then pod print on demand which is a large thing people do a lot of those are really your three options here um and again they all carry some huge pros and cons before we go through that want you to ask yourself two questions if you're in this startup phase or haven't decided number one how much money do I have to start and this is a really important

question we'll go through it and number two do I have something specific in mind that I'm passionate around and want to build a brand for long term I sold $2.1 million of dog water bottles when you know the virus hit in 2020 I also sold like a million dollars of these like 3D wall clock things I've sold so much of the dumbest stuff that I didn't care about I just kind of slap stuff together I know how to run ads like it works I make some money and then it just dies off very different I

don't really like doing that a lot with Tik Tok shop um but there's a way to do it so we're going to talk about this because these two questions your answer will determine how you proceed I'm not involved with this I'm just helping guide you okay so question number one the money conversation inventory costs money plain and simple I mean you could get away with like 1,500 to two grand maybe for inventory cost if your product is is pretty cheap you know we like to order at least a few hundred units that's a couple Grand

if you go the manufacturing route like I mentioned mqs are higher for supplements most manufacturers are 12we lead time minimum so you're 3 to 5 months out forever getting a product and the mlqs can be 10,000 units 10,000 at 8 bucks do you have 80 grand laying around just to put into inventory right there's risk there so a lot of stuff here uh there is definitely an element of risk that's introduced when buying inventory for something new it's always possible it doesn't sell well and the final thing that I'm going to bring up is your

money stays on the street for a while okay this is the cash flow conversation with Tik Tok uh if you haven't watched YouTube that I did where I broke down doing over $6 million a month consistently with an e-commerce brand it's like a 40-minute documentary you'll want to check out that YouTube video I did recently we talk a lot about cash flow right fronting money for inventory how that all works so this is just something to consider um is like how much money you want to be putting into this because there's options where you don't

have to get inventory um but it's it's something to consider okay now number two if you have no product in mind that's fine super chill it doesn't matter but then it's straight to the drawing board you got to be doing research and figure out what it is you're going to sell okay you don't have to be passionate about something necessarily General product research finding stuff that works you're going to order what we call a hard good this is a product you're not customizing it's nothing special it is available on Alibaba there's a lot of stuff

around this like how you pick it and that can be a whole separate video itself so let me know in the comments if you'd want me to make something on like Tik Tok Shop product research specifically um we also have a school group that goes through all that like we have a ton of stuff inside of there um but Alibaba is probably going to be your friend for sourcing the first few hundred units you don't need anything fancy you don't need a direct relationship with the manufacturer just get a couple quotes for whatever product you're

thinking of and Order 100 to 200 of them it's it's not that deep it's not going to cost you all that much but remember ask yourself when you're looking for products what can you make content for if you're a bald 40-year-old it's probably going to be a little difficult to sell a hair curler now maybe you have a wife that has hair and is willing to do videos right the big piece of this that you're going to see throughout this little presentation I got for you is content is so crucial it's so important for Tik

Tok shop it's massive it's everything so keep that in mind now how do we sell with no inventory this is a unique angle for Tik Tok shop most people haven't really gone the Drop Shipping route and it's something that's growing that I'm seeing work and there are some really cool opportunities to do it and at least like springboard a brand if you don't have a ton of money for inventory you don't want to risk it or take all the time to order inventory it's a month or two of waiting right so you have a couple

options here um it's called print on Demand right pod was one of the things we showed you earlier printify is a platform that allows you to do this and it's really interesting they have a lot of products you can connect to Shopify and like do custom t-shirts and they just print the orders one by one kind of like Drop Shipping now a lot of their products aren't available for Tik Tok shop but they do have a Tik Tock uh thing you can go under catalog here and go to Tik Tock ready so this is really

cool because printify allows you to do whatever you want you got your basic stuff your t-shirts your sweatshirts things it can be a little more difficult to try to you know get cool margin with and like actually be making good money candle you probably brand that pretty good but they have a lot of stuff tote bags and we can go all the way through they got coffee you could build your own coffee brand without needing to do the research the manufacturing the taste test the samples and ordering 10,000 of them like it allows you to

kind of get the ball rolling so if you wanted to start a clothing brand right you don't have to order all that up front you can prove your concept and your designs get customers that are happy with what you're doing and then from there you can go build custom stuff once you have the money right so it allows you to kind of get into it so I would highly recommend checking out princey super cool platform what a lot of people don't realize is this can add another stream of Revenue with a new product so even

if you have a Tik Tok shop with inventory if you want to add more products on there you can do that through printy but they've got a wide range of stuff I'd really recommend going like the cool custom route stuff that the margin is not as clear some people pay $10 for a candle other pay 40 what's the difference really it's branding it makes that unclear margin range where you can maybe sell it for a little more again coffee super cool you could lean on that it's organic or whatever it might be uh but that's

really nice and again you spend nothing up front you fulfill each order one at a time and it just syncs directly with Tik Tok shop so it makes it really easy and that's why we've teamed up with priny you guys can check them out down below I would highly recommend their platform because it allows you to do stuff that you normally couldn't do on Tik Tok shop because they have a lot of restrictions around fulfillment which has previously meant you have to have inventory so I would highly highly recommend that check them out down below

they're a super cool company we've had a lot of people use them inside of our group in fact one of our guys John who's been inside my coaching group for probably seven months now uh is really good at making Tik Tok videos and so he'll make funny t-shirts is really his thing like political stuff and you know like when Trump got shot and like put all that stuff on there and yeah it's more trendy so it dies off but I mean $112,000 days like I showed earlier two 10K days in a row you know having

a 7K day after that I me he's been averaging 100 to 250k a month with a 65% margin for a long time that's a lot of money now I want to preface this this is not like a long-term thing right because this stuff just dies out it's not a brand that's sellable but he's getting the experience he's learning how all this works and he's making a lot of money that can then fund the next project so that's why print on demand is really cool so I would definitely recommend checking out printy I will leave the

link down below for you guys um just another alternative option to look at now a couple things to to chat about just want to be open and honest about this there's a lot of pros and there's a couple cons just like anything okay number one your margin okay your margin is pretty much always going to suffer a little bit because because you're not ordering inventory you're paying a premium because you're ordering one by one plain and simple so your cost is going to be higher it doesn't really matter all that much because you're just looking

to prove your concept and you can still make good money and then if you prove it then you can order inventory but so margin suffers a little bit uh number two competition people can kind of spin up a competitive design really quick so again go back to the example of what our guy John's doing like with the Trump shirts for an example when he got shot there was 10 or 20 sellers doing the same thing within two days right he spun his up within an hour the next day he made 10 grand right so it's

it's quick you got to be quick on stuff now you can go more custom designs and whatnot that are like not time sensitive but people can spend up a a competitive listing to you pretty quickly so that's something to keep in mind and number three is the risk element and here's what I mean by this this is what most people don't get with print on demand if I'm coming over here and doing custom designs like on a towel or whatever else like no offense we've worked with a lot of people most people's designs are trash

like they're just not good so you have that element of like unless you're an artsy person like sketching stuff one of those drawing iPads like you know what you're doing or you hire somebody there's a whole element to like a why is my stuff not selling I go look at it's like the worst looking product I've ever seen and it's tough because it's custom they made it so they feel like it's good there's a lot of bias going on there so it's just difficult and then they don't refer to it as what people call a

winning product which is a whole another conversation but yeah really print on demand is a cool option so you can check that out now product listing this is a big thing like the listing is what people see when they go to buy right it's your website if you will through Tik Tok here's your priority list number one once you have a product selected and whatever inventory sorted or it's on the way you need photos specifically seven minimum quality graphic design photos where do you get this if you are not handy don't do this don't do

it yourself spend $100 to $200 hire somebody who works for 20 bucks an hour on upwork give them a Max budget hey 200 bucks Max we need at least seven photos and have them do it deliver the project it's very easy I would go to upwork to do this this is where we hired our first person I spent under $100 for some pretty good photos and now we're spending thousands on two photos because guess what our listing's working everything is proven the concepts proven on that new Tik Tok shop that I had showed you up

here right now I can invest the money back into this this thing is is is printting good money the brand is doing 40 to 50K a month with a really high profit margin right so it it allows us to do other stuff number two pricing and I want to make this very clear you're listing when people see this on Tik Tok shop this is the order of what matters number one your photo is the most important thing the second most important this is in order is your price okay has to be dialed okay a lot

of people actually get this wrong Flash Deals running discounts making sure you're priced competitively number three your product title the title is right below there so it goes photo title price I think the price is more important than the title but the title think about the title is your description and the reason that I put the description at the last is because first of all it is way down nobody really goes to look at it they can get all the information these days if you have good graphic design they probably saw a video which is

how they landed on the listing anyway so they have some information and it has no SEO relevance on Tik Tok really because it's not as much of a search-driven platform like Amazon so it I don't I don't put that much importance on it okay and and people can have their own opinions on this but like we talk directly with Tik Tok like we've been assigned to rep and and the levels of people you only get when your company does 10 million plus a year in Revenue right it's a different level rep you get with Tik

Tok and so there's there's stuff here that I just want to point out like this is what we're hearing internally it's not just my opinion okay now your launch strategy once you have all this stuff kind of dialed your list is put together get the product how do how do we launch what are we doing okay I want to get specific for you I like to give people that I work with an action list of what you should do every day okay I'm saying you you do okay because there is going to be actions you

can outour stuff you can hire but you just need to make sure this gets done at the end of the day okay number one minimum of 1x Tik Tok per day on your brand page I would like to divert this back to an example here why is John doing $10,000 a day I'll tell you why almost none of this is coming from Affiliates zero dollars of it is coming from ads he's not boosted any posts the only source of traffic really for him is the videos that they're making on his Tik Tok page and he

is making a heck of a lot more than one a day in fact that's pretty much all he does every day he just make four five six Tik toks he's got a sister helping he hired another person so they're cranking out like many successful brands on Tik Tok many pieces of content a day so when you're starting minimum one per day and you should do this for 90 days before you even consider changing products or adjusting something you can change your price in that in the meantime or whatever your photos but don't change what you're

doing reach out to at least 30 influencers per day try sending out free samples to Quality creators people have actually made at least a few thousand in sales for similar stuff that's an action that we do every single day and number three this is more in the first month so it's not as long term gather reviews this is really important for a new listing people can see how many units are sold they can see uh the reviews they can all that is so crucial so important for conversions so here's what I do and we'll talk

about this have your family and friends order and I'll talk more about this but basically give it time this should be a 90-day process whatever you decide to launch on Tik Tok don't be giving up on three weeks right like three weeks in four weeks in it's just it's not the right timeline you have to build the listing get reviews you want to be posting content Tik Tok starts to reward you when you do those things they will give you organic sales it's it's a slower game organic content's big price yourself low to start a

lot lower than you think like whatever price you have in mind lower it okay getting Affiliates on board is almost always necessary unless you're a sick product that's like good organically right like some funny thing a viral thing that you can do organically um then you might not need Affiliates they're always good to have especially for a viral product but it's one of those things where like just focus on Affiliates reach out to people every single day there's a lot of ways to do that in our school group we go through like automated Bots we

use the flows the follow-ups how we pay people retainers all that stuff so you can always check that out um create organic content I don't want I could sit here for four hours and go through this but I think the content that you're posting on your page matters a lot study what works there's a platform called C data I'll leave a link below too that's what we use it allows us to see all the data for products and in fact you can go over here on it into products and I can see everything all the

top products like this little hair thing I can see exactly how much money it's generating 2 million bucks in the last 30 days I can see all the Affiliates that are promoting it but I can see their videos so this is where I can kind of build off the Frameworks for what's working for similar products to mine so use that look at Tik Tok kind of copy the viral hooks the first couple seconds is always the most important um evok an emotion you know make people excited sad happy mad piss them off it doesn't matter

like that's why the viral t-shirts for the the Trump stuff is working well for you know one of our our clients because it's pissing people off half the people love it half people hate it it works um you know get good lighting very simple stuff here and again you can hire somebody to do this for your posting One A Day friend family but it's also good to do it yourself you know to learn the game um but just you want content going out that's big now uh before we kind of near towards the end these

last two points are really important uh building reviews how do you like kind of get it going faster this is stuff people don't do because I'll tell you this from working with people for six years that have like more of a Drop Shipping mindset a lot uh they don't give a about their customers it's just a fact and I'll tell you from my experience I wanted to care um about customers for a long time but I I didn't until I was like really building a brand something that I like really care like I take care

of the customer they want a refund you get a refund but like really like that giving a level I don't know how to describe it it's like I didn't do that until a I had made a lot of money in the money kind of didn't matter as much in this interim but also like I just wanted a real brand like I put the customers before any I don't I don't care about the money behind the business that's just like been my mindset for a while and it's been totally different so here's how you kind of

get that going right first 10 20 reviews friends family lower your price if you're going to sell it for 25 maybe the first week of your product put it at $10 with free shipping you're breaking even at best and send that link to all your friends and family offer to venmo them back zel them send them cash whatever pay them back but have people order and leave a review if you are self fulfilling if you're the one fulfilling your orders which is easy you can order a poeno printer a thermal printer on Amazon for like

80 bucks get some labels for 20 bucks get some pack packages for 10 bucks it's very easy to do you can be set up for like 100 bucks if you're doing this yourself send handwritten thank you cards on like a little you know index card in every package this is going to sound dumb I never fulfilled one single order I had over 600,000 orders shipped tens of millions of dollars in sales and I had never shipped one order didn't know the process of a label or whatever else and the reason is because I just I

used facilities I automated it I was on the ad side I just didn't need to be involved but now a Tik Tok shop I got really involved with the brand that I'm building and I sent handwritten cards and I sent out the first couple thousand orders myself out of my house right like a different level of of caring U but so handwritten cards we saw a huge increase in our percentage of reviews that were left so very very important there uh place the customer about profits like I said it's hard to do for many people

especially if you're just starting out but trust me it really is the right move especially on a platform where like reviews and stuff are so public and prevalent and important in the sales process and I'll tell you this is our sop this is my company's internal standard operating procedure anyone who leaves a three star review or less including three star right uh get a message automatically okay I'm working hard to improve it hey you're not liking it get you different flavor maybe your shirt size was wrong if it's a shirt like whatever the thing is

I try to offer them a replacement first and then we will offer them some sort of additional credit or whatever in exchange for changing the review I have about a 40% success rate at changing negative reviews that makes a huge difference right like one of our listings has about 300 reviews we probably got like 40 50 ones probably 60 that aren't five stars right if I can change a whole like section of those that makes a big difference you know now we're going from like 4.3 rating review to a 4.5 five right and at scale

now it's harder to dilute that down because we have a lot of reviews like one bad review doesn't do anything to us we still try to fix it but like you see what I'm saying it just it locks you into a good place and number five scaling I think I see a lot of people ask me how to scale I'm like how much money you doing oh we're just starting are you profitable yet no so you want to scale you want to scale unprofitable right you want more of content you're posting your Affiliates how much

content they're posting this is like one of the most important metrics how many videos are going out every day on Tik Tok with your product tagged real influencer collabs this is different paying actual influencers on Tik Tok you have creators all the little Affiliates that just promote products all day long you have actual creators totally different okay massively different ads a lot of people need to tap into that product expansion more products more SKS right more of what you're doing more variants more whatever and then platform diversification scaling off of there right my brand that

we launched up here that I just showed you uh all the way up here we launched on Tik Tok around this point we got over onto Shopify and Amazon and started doing that now each of those I mean Amazon's doing like 15 grand a month for us Shopify is doing another like 10 to 15 10 to 12 um Shopify we're running a 22x return right now on every dollar we spent and Amazon I'm not spending anything on ads we're 15 grand a month like it's ridiculous it's ridiculous margins you know and so like we're talking

about like in insane numbers here so that is the scaling side of things so in summary don't be a wuss put in the work build that business take the shop you know do the work a lot of people just give up after a week or two uh secondly the only way to drop ship on Tik Tok shop is with print on demand so check out printify um collab us here on this video big shout out to them you can check it out down below great platform take your time this is not a fast process this

is not Facebook ads to a Shopify store where you test products and I'm going to cycle 18 different products and see what works and try to get a none of that this is like a little bit of a long-term play so do it though but it's sustainable so awesome and check out the resources link below guys we have our school group um super easy 50 bucks a month entry point teach you everything you need to know by getting your feet wet with Tik Tok how to start selling all those things whole Community there's a CO

a coach inside of there I'm inside of there there's two courses inside of there and then we also have my more personal Mastermind my group with my Elite students where we just focus more on this you get to work with me multiple times a week I'm personally involved in what you're doing it's obviously way more expensive we bring in about four to six people a month into that group but you can apply for that down below there'll be a little video and then you can fill out a form and book a call but that's what

we got check out the resources down below I really hope this video answered some stuff for you uh you know I came on the scene in 2016 um as a 16 year-old making really good money with like Instagram shoutouts and then starting early with Facebook ads but it was still kind of a battle I was still new and and the the platform had been around for a bit with Tik Tok I've never seen something this simple this easy that we're this early to so I think there's a really unique opportunity and I see a lot

of people myself included taking advantage of it so I hope you do as well if one of your goals is to build an e-commerce brand then this should help answer a lot of those questions so get started on Tik Tok shop it's been super cool for us very profitable and I really hope you enjoy this video leave a like subscribe I'd appreciate it and I'll see you in the next one oh [Music]