Jordan West, founder and president of Social Commerce Club, the TikTok Shop agency Podean acquired in July, walked through how the agency launches brands on the platform by seeding product to affiliate creators and timing their posts to a single date, in an episode of the “Honest Ecommerce” podcast posted to YouTube on November 5. West said the conversation was recorded October 1.

West, who said the agency was started about 19 months earlier after years owning eight brands, told host Chase Clymer that TikTok Shop hands control of a brand’s message to the creators selling it. “We can’t go through on TikTok Shop and say yes to every single piece of creative. It just doesn’t work like that,” West said, calling the shift “the social commerce singularity.” West pointed to Nike and Lululemon as brands that have stayed off TikTok Shop. “I don’t think that they’re ready to give up that power yet,” West said.

Six of the practices West described apply to any brand weighing the channel.

1. Sample wide, then invest in the top 4%. TikTok Shop ranks affiliates from L0, with no sales, to L7, with $1 million or more in the last 28 days. West described results as “80/20 of 80/20”: of 100 creators sampled, about 20 make usable videos and about four are “phenomenal.” “Our goal is not to get an amazing video from every single creator. Our goal is to find the gold of these creators,” West said. Those four are moved into WhatsApp groups and direct messages, with the aim of getting “as many videos out of them as humanly possible.” FastMoss told NI last month that sellers at its YFCon expo were moving from sampling at scale to finding creators who drive sales.

2. Secure the first 200 sales before buying ads. West said TikTok’s GMV Max ad product would not spend for a new shop until it had sales history. “They have told us internally it’s 200 sales,” West said. The agency uses Selico, a sampling service West said TikTok Shop has approved, to send product to 200 buyers. One brand had “like 10,000 pieces of creative, but it just was not spending” until it crossed that mark, West said, and it now spends $60,000 a day on GMV Max.

3. Launch everything on one date. For a blitz, Social Commerce Club samples its network of about 6,000 creators at L3 or above ($35,000 a month in sales) and asks them to hold posts until a set date with “five videos minimum ready.” A recent contest offering a $250 bonus for 20 videos, with AI-generated videos excluded, produced 32 videos per sample, West said. The brand then puts ad spend behind the wave. “It’s not low and slow, it has to be concentrated,” West said, adding that TikTok now recommends the method to brands.

4. Budget for months before break-even. “You will not, probably not even break even for the first three to six months,” West said, describing TikTok Shop as an advertising channel first. West cited a Finaloop report finding that brands doing $1 million or more a year on TikTok Shop grew total revenue three times faster than a control group, with contribution margin 3.5 times higher. West said Portland Leather Goods grew from $40,000 to $2 million a month on the channel and then saw an unexplained extra $200,000 a day in retail and website sales. “It halos onto all of these different platforms,” West said.

5. Reuse affiliate videos on other channels. Because affiliates earn only on sales, West said, their videos are “designed to sell the product.” West said the agency is licensing top performers for Meta, connected TV and linear TV ads. “Anything on TikTok moves really well into other channels,” West said.

6. Smaller brands should build the skill in house. For brands under about $2 million in total sales, West advised hiring a virtual assistant and learning to make content for the brand’s own accounts. West said a large beauty group the agency pitched would need 13 full-time equivalents for every five brands, and that a $3,000-a-month agency is “just not gonna be worth it.” Brands with $10 million or more in sales on other channels can run 19 additional marketing accounts that point back to their shop, West said.

TikTok has released a standalone TikTok Shop app in four Southeast Asian markets, and West said TikTok Shop will open in Canada, where Social Commerce Club is based, in the first quarter.

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