How we sell on Tik Tok Shop

When we first went viral it was pure magic. Sales were pouring in without us spending a single dollar on ads. Completely organic. Completely natural. And it felt unreal. A few videos with millions of views equated to hundreds of orders every day! I had never sold anything at this scale before so I didn’t really know what “normal” looked like. Was this going to last a day? A week? A few months? I had no clue, but I figured we probably had about two months before competition started showing up. Whether that meant other small 3D print shops popping up, or large overseas manufacturers swooping in with cheaper injection molded versions, I knew it was only a matter of time.

Turns out I was pretty much spot on with that estimate. After about a month I started seeing a couple replicas on TikTok Shop, then a few weeks later there were more, and then one simple Google search showed me Etsy already had dozens of makers all doing the exact same thing. On one hand it was frustrating, but on the other hand it was also kind of cool knowing we had started the trend. Our product had created a wave. The only downside was how noticeable it became in our sales, and this is our story on how we sell on Tik Tok Shop.

For about two months we were riding a high. Our best day ever we cleared around $4,500 in sales in a single day. That’s a number I never thought I’d see come from something I designed and printed in my basement. But as time went on, competition kept increasing. Even now if you search Amazon for Owala keychains you’ll find countless copycat accounts. Some of them are even using our product pictures in their listings, which is wild.

Fun fact: my actual hands are on Amazon listings for products I don’t even sell.

My product pictures, My hands, Some random Amazon Product

So how do you deal with that? For us, the answer was ads and creatives. The wonderful, expensive, and sometimes frustrating world of ads. The truth is, organic traffic will only take you so far once competition floods in. If you want to stay relevant, you have to pay for it. Thankfully, ads are actually part of my 9-5, so I had a head start in understanding how the ecosystem works. I knew our only chance to keep competing was to dial in our margins and target a healthy ROI or ROAS (Return on Investment or Return on Ad Spend).

Right now we target about a 3x return on ad spend, which is solid and keeps us profitable. But I’ll be honest, it’s not nearly as fun as waking up to natural organic sales with no spend at all. There’s a thrill in that first wave of virality that ads will never replace. Still, if you want to build something sustainable, learning how to leverage paid ads is a skill you can’t avoid.

The real turning point though wasn’t just running ads, it was figuring out which type of ads actually worked, and why affiliates and more importantly their "Creatives" became the secret weapon that kept us in the game. That’s where things got interesting. We will cover that and how to run a strong ad campaign in Tik Tok Shop next.