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I had 14 calls this week. Fourteen. And nearly every single one had the same conversation buried in it somewhere.

Brand gets burned by an agency. Brand loses faith in TikTok Shop. Brand asks me: "Is this platform even worth it?"

One brand sent 200 free samples through their old agency. Got 2 sales. Two.

Another spent months with an agency that delivered a 1.1 ROI with over 300 videos — none of which were being used for ads.

And a third? They've been through seventeen agencies. Seventeen. I don't even have seventeen shirts.

So yeah. Let's talk about what's actually going wrong here.

DEEP DIVE

Here's the uncomfortable truth I keep having to deliver on these calls.

TikTok Shop doesn't have a platform problem. It has an approach problem.

Most brands — and most agencies — treat TikTok Shop like a slot machine. Shove in some samples. Pull the lever. Hope for three cherries. If it doesn't pay out, blame the machine and walk away.

That's not a strategy. That's a prayer with shipping costs.

Here's what the "send samples and hope" model actually looks like:

Send 200 samples. Maybe 40 creators post. Maybe 3 videos get traction. You get a few sales, declare the platform broken, and go back to Amazon PPC.

Meanwhile, no one ran Spark Ads on the content that did work. No one tracked which creators actually drove engagement. No one built a system around the wins.

You basically hired 200 freelancers, gave them zero direction, and wondered why the output was inconsistent.

If you ran your Amazon business like that, you'd be bankrupt by Tuesday.

Here's what we do instead. And it's not complicated. It's just... deliberate.

🎯 Step 1: Send 100 samples.
Not 200. Not 500. A hundred. Targeted at creators who make content the algorithm actually likes — not creators with the biggest follower count.

🎯 Step 2: Run a contest.
First creator to hit a sales target wins a bonus. Now you've got motivation AND a natural filter.

🎯 Step 3: Identify your winners.
Out of 100 creators, maybe 5-8 will produce content that performs. That's your shortlist. That's your content engine.

🎯 Step 4: Feed the winners into ads.
Take their best-performing content. Run it through GMV Max. Now you've got organic reach and paid amplification on proven creative.

🎯 Step 5: Scale what works. Cut what doesn't.

That's it. Contest → identify winners → feed ads → scale.

It's not sexy. It won't go viral on LinkedIn. But it works.

I get this one every week. And the answer is yes. You absolutely could.

But you'd be missing the point.

Let me reframe something that changes the whole conversation.

DEEP DIVE

Most brands look at that 25% commission and flinch. I get it. On a $20 product with $8 COGS, that commission drops your profit to $7 per sale. Feels thin.

But here's what they're not counting.

That creator didn't just make a sale. They made a video. And TikTok's algorithm looked at that video. And if it got engagement, it got distributed. Organically. To thousands of people who never clicked an ad.

Now multiply that across 15 active affiliates each posting 2-3 videos a month. That's 45 pieces of content. Some of those get shown to 50,000 people. Some get no views. Some of those viewers search your brand on Amazon the next week. Some of them buy on your website a month later.

You paid $700 in commissions. You created an engine that generates revenue across three channels.

Compare that to paid ads: you spend $1,400/month, you get a 2:1 ROAS if you're good, and the second you stop paying, the engine dies.

Paid ads rent attention. Affiliates build infrastructure.

Affiliates generate content. But content alone doesn't give you predictable revenue. You can't call your affiliate network on a Thursday and say "hey, can you double our sales by Friday?"

The smart brands use both. Affiliates create the content. Ads amplify the best of it. You control the dial.

One more thing. And this is the bit that most people miss entirely.

TikTok Shop isn't a standalone channel. It's the top of a flywheel.

TikTok = discovery. People find your product through creator content. They see it in context. They get curious.

Amazon = conversion. A chunk of those people don't buy on TikTok. They go to Amazon and search your brand. Amazon loves branded searches. Your conversion rate on those searches is 15%+.

Your website = retention. Some of those Amazon buyers find your site. Now you own the customer data. Now you've got email. Now you've got lifetime value.

One creator video on TikTok creates ripples across all three channels. Most brands only measure the TikTok sale and miss 40% of the revenue that video actually generated.

I'm going to say something that will annoy the people who sell TikTok Shop courses with screenshots of Day 1 results.

The first 2-3 months are going to feel like you're burning money.

You're recruiting affiliates. You're testing content. You're figuring out which creators work. You're learning what your audience responds to. You're building the system.

That's not wasted spend. That's R&D.

The brands I see win are the ones who accept that the first 90 days are foundation-building. They're not panicking at Month 2 because they understand what they're building.

The brands that fail? They want $70K in Month 1, and when it doesn't happen, they fire the agency and start over with a new one. And then they do it again. And again.

You wouldn't plant a tree and dig it up after two weeks because it wasn't producing fruit. Stop doing that with TikTok Shop.

1. Audit your affiliate recruitment. Stop recruiting for follower count. Start recruiting for content quality. You want creators whose videos the algorithm likes — not creators with big audiences and low engagement.

2. If you're running affiliates without ads, fix that. Affiliates create the content. Ads amplify the winners. Running one without the other is like having an engine with no fuel, or fuel with no engine.

3. Track your off-platform effect. How many people saw an affiliate video and then bought on Amazon or your site? If you're not measuring that, you're undervaluing your affiliate program by 30-40%. Start tracking branded search volume on Amazon after your TikTok content spikes.

Thanks for reading.

- Paul 👊

PS: If you're sitting there thinking "my agency did the spray-and-pray thing and I got burned" — yeah. You're not alone. That's basically the industry default right now. If you want to talk about what the system looks like for your specific brand, reply to this email. I'm not going to pitch you. I just want to hear what happened so I can keep making this newsletter useful.