Mastering TikTok Shop: From $0 Ads Spend to $100K
I made $100,000 on a single TikTok Shop with $0 in ad spend. I also helped friend get to $10,000 a day. One friend hit $200,000 last month, and many more people like it. So here’s exactly what we did so that you can copy me for TikTok Ads.
This graph has been extremely consistent. In fact, I don’t even post much on this TikTok, and it still makes me $1,000 to $15,000 per month. But the TikTok band got reversed. It’s back. Let’s make some money. Here’s how you can do it. I’m also going to tell you about my brand, my product, my listing, my financials, and all the other stuff that nobody else shows you, but I do.
The Power of Product Selection
Now, how do you actually make money with TikTok Shop? You need the right product to sell. That’s step one. So how do we find a product? You should be using a tool just like Cow Data that allows you to see everything. Look, this product did $2.6 million in the last month, $2 million, $1.8 million. You get the idea. In fact, a book is currently number one on TikTok Shop, which is crazy. What is this, Amazon? But look, in the last 90 days, we can see their growth. Right, let’s back it up even further. Look at that. They were nothing four or five months ago, right? So we can actually go down here and not only see the product, right, and get the information on how much they’re selling it for on average, right? Well, we can also go down here and see every creator, every affiliate that’s promoting them. We can also see every video they’re making, so you can get ideas for your marketing. And I can see what’s working now.
Finding Winning Products with Data Tools
Let’s say I want to sell a book that’s just like this. I don’t want there to be any more than five big listings on TikTok. What’s a big listing? A big listing is one that has at least 5,000 to 10,000 orders. If there’s a lot of big boys, it gets a little competitive. Now, you want to know the secret on how this brand blew up because they came out of nowhere. They’re actually big on Amazon, and a lot of people on TikTok Shop are taking winners on Amazon, Facebook ads with dropshipping stores, and they’re launching it on TikTok. Now, there’s two ways you can go about the product. You can either find something or create something. That’s it.
The “Find vs. Create” Approach
Let’s say we want to find something. This headphone is doing really well, like obviously a million dollars in the last month. So let’s see, like active noise cancellation headphones. We’ll go over into Alibaba and take a look because if I want to order inventory, I’m going to be looking for something that’s clean, it’s sleek, kind of like this. This almost looks like a pair of Beats or Bose. These ones have like a nice matte finish. So again, we don’t have to copy the same exact thing, but we could get a similar, really nice-looking one for not a lot of money. Let’s see, $4, $15. You can see the margins are pretty crazy. They’re averaging $45 per unit, and they made a million dollars. So there’s obviously a market there for high-quality looking headphones without needing to spend $300 bucks on Bose or Beats.
Finding Products
Now, finding products is the fastest, right? It’s pretty easy. Kind of see what works, not a lot of competition. Let me order some of this and get started. However, if you want to create something, that takes a lot more time, and that’s actually what I did. It was a real pain in the ass. It was very slow to start, and so you know what, screw it. Let me just show you one of the brands that I’m working on. This is Tasty Gains. Okay, over 5,000 units sold. You can see that up here on the top. Our only main product that’s really getting all the sales, 4,500 units sold, 315 reviews, 4.5 stars. This thing is awesome, right? It’s doing really well now. We’ve got all sorts of reviews on here, people even photos. It’s super cool. Like the brand is starting to get going, and there’s only one product. I’m like actively selling, but do you know how slow this started compared to me finding a product and scaling it really quick?
The first month I made dollars, like $20, right, one sale. The second month was like $1,400. Then it was like $2,900, then it was $7,900, $8,900. Then it wasn’t until month five or made some like actual money, made like $29,000, and it’s slowly grown from there, right? Now, just with this one product, I’m making about $60,000 a month. The profit margin is not 10, not 20, not, it’s through the roof. It’s over 50% because I’m not really spending anything on ads.
Building a Brand on TikTok Shop
The Importance of Reviews and Social Proof
Now, what people don’t consider with TikTok Shop is it’s just like Amazon in the sense that these reviews matter, right? People click on these, they do review them, and even if they’re not looking through all of these to like go through everybody’s review, well, they are definitely looking at the top. When they just see how many reviews you have and what the average star rating is, so you definitely want to be above a four-star. That’s like a base minimum, and the more reviews you have, the more sales you’re going to get, which gives you more reviews, and there goes the snowball. And so for all the yappers on YouTube, there’s always some in the comments. Undisputable proof right here, it works. Here’s one of my brands. I normally don’t share my stuff publicly because then people try to rip it off and copy, but this one’s a little more difficult to copy. We custom made this product, right? But if you want to see more radical transparency in the e-commerce space, make sure to subscribe to the channel. I post videos weekly, and I don’t have anything to hide.
Navigating TikTok’s Throttling for New Listings
Now, TikTok throttles new listings. The reason that you see this as such a consistent sales channel is because unless you have a video that goes viral and gets millions of views, it’s very difficult to break out of the box that they put you in, and this has been incredibly consistent, which is great. I’m grateful for it. I didn’t spend any money on ads through most of this, but at the same time, it hasn’t allowed me to scale because none of our videos went viral, not one. But here’s the truth about TikTok Shop: if you want to explode a listing, you have to be making content on your brand page regularly. They throttle your listing. You will not have a video that goes viral immediately. It’s very rare. They want to see that you’re following the rules as a seller, that you have good reviews, you’re sending out your products on time, you’re not getting a crazy amount of chargebacks or refunds or, you know, cancellation requests. They want to make sure that you fit the mold of what they’re looking for as a seller. So make sure you take care of your customers, make sure you answer the customer support through TikTok, which is actually right up here under customer messages. Make sure you’re doing all these things because TikTok will start to reward you with free customers. It’s crazy.
Becoming Your Own Affiliate
Now, one of the ways to get around that is actually to be your own affiliate instead of creating content just on your brand page, right, which is like one of the pages. If you go down and take a look at all these creators that are promoting this product, right, they’re all making bank, right? They’re crushing it for this brand. They’re helping produce a lot of money, but you can actually be your own affiliate, and you should. You could build another TikTok page or buy one. And you could buy a TikTok page that has access to TikTok Shop. You need a couple followers to do it. You could pay $300 to $400, right? Just look up any TikTok affiliate Discord, pay $10 bucks to join it or whatever, and they always have a reference on where to buy a page. And what you can do is basically make the same content you’re making on the other page and follow what all the other affiliates are doing, right? If you’re selling, let’s say earbuds, well, for earbuds, headphone content would be applicable. It’s going to be the same types of videos. So we’re going to go in and kind of remake all of these, right? Travel videos, this looks like it’s in an airport, yeah, like all these different videos. We can go remake the same style for our product, right? You can post that on multiple pages.
Scaling Your TikTok Shop Success
Leveraging Multiple Platforms (TikTok & Amazon)
Now, I actually want to show you how well this works because TikTok feeds every platform, right? Because we make money on TikTok, we’re also doing really well on Amazon because people might want to go shop there and get the product a little faster. Take Chris for an example. I started working with Chris 5, 6 months ago, and he found a product, threw it up on TikTok Shop. Within a little bit of time, he was doing like $500 a week, nothing to brag about, starting to see if the product would work. He’s making some videos. We’ll fast forward a few months, and he sends me this message. He’s made almost $200,000 in the last 30 days, did really well on TikTok Shop, but also crushed it on Amazon because of that. He spent $0 on ads on TikTok Shop. So you can see the growth potential when you have the right product and you pair that with the right marketing.
The Affiliate Marketing Strategy
And if you want to learn exactly how we’re building real brands in 2025, taking advantage of multiple platforms and crushing it with short-form marketing, join our school group. Link down below. It’s less than $2 a day. You’ll get a free welcome call where we’ll make a strategy with you. You get access to our group calls, the coach is in there, you get access to myself, all of our courses, a bunch of resources, again for less than two bucks a day. So very easy place to start and get access to a community of actual people making money. So make sure to check that out.
And now the slightly harder part of TikTok Shop is actually the expansion. You’re going to be making a lot of content yourself. The harder part is getting affiliates. This is how you expand, right? How do you become the person who has all these people making videos for you? Well, it’s two things. They’re going to want to see that your product is really good and really cool and stands out in some way. Secondly, they’re going to want a really good commission. They want to get paid. So if we go up here, this brand is only paying 10% in commission, but they can do that. They can. They probably lowered their commission because they’re very big. So it’s very easy for affiliates to make sales on a big listing because they have a lot of reviews, they have a lot of social proof, they know the product works. But it’s difficult to do this in the beginning, which is why you’re going to want to offer a very high commission. That’s what we did. It made it very easy.
Profitable TikTok Shop Ads
And this is actually a tool that allows us to see everybody who’s selling all the similar products that we’re selling. So again, if we’re doing earbuds, we can reach out to all the affiliates that are crushing for headphones, and there’s a lot of them, right, on multiple listings. So this makes it pretty easy. And the cool thing is when you want to actually scale a TikTok Shop listing, you turn on ads. Let me show you that over here under marketing. You go to Shop Ads, and this is where you’re going to see the internal GMV Max campaigns on TikTok. Now, this one is running at a very low budget. I think it’s targeted to spend $60 a day. It’s not a lot. It doesn’t quite spend that much, but as you can see, it’s very profitable. So we’ll back this up through the last couple of days. Every time I spend, you know, $20 for an example, I’m making $150, $170. Like, it’s a pretty ridiculous return. And if we average this out over the last 30 days, again, I’m not spending much, $1,000 spent to make back $6,500. Would you make that trade-off?
Lot of Videos for TikTok Ads
Now, do you want to know how to do that, like logistically speaking? You need a lot of videos, and that’s where affiliates become really helpful, sending out free samples to creators in exchange for them making content that feeds the ads. Now, I will give you a big fat warning about running ads on TikTok. Don’t do it if you’re a brand new listing, right? You see my listing over here that’s got 4.5 stars, it’s got 300-plus reviews. The ads start to work on this because they’re social proof, right? There’s reviews. People don’t want to buy from a sponsored post when they go there and there’s no reviews. Right, it doesn’t look very, very good. Also, TikTok doesn’t like to give you a lot of sales or traction or views until you’ve proven yourself as a seller. So ads tend to not work super well for brand new shops.