TikTok Shop has quickly become an essential part of any good e-commerce strategy.
Not only is TikTok Shop the biggest social commerce platform, but it is also one of the best ways to drive incremental shoppers back to your Amazon page.
Brands are rightfully excited about the platform—but we constantly hear misinformation about how to best use TikTok.
Inspired by our recent webinar on TikTok Shop with Carina McLeod of eCommerce Nurse, we wanted to take the time today to dispel three common myths about TikTok.
Misconception #1: “I don’t see the same results on TikTok as on Amazon”
We hear time and time again from brands and agencies that are disappointed in their sales numbers on TikTok.
They compare their revenue on TikTok Shop to their revenue on Amazon, and insist their TikTok Shop experiment is failing.
Comparing TikTok sales to Amazon sales is shortsighted for a couple of reasons.
First, it’s important to remember that TikTok and Amazon don’t function in the same way.
TikTok is a discovery platform—you’re reaching people who go to the app first and foremost to be entertained, not necessarily to shop.
You should think of TikTok Shop as more of an incremental play than anything. You’re chasing audiences who weren’t searching actively for a product like yours. Therefore, on TikTok, you’re bringing net-new people to your product pages.
Second, TikTok and Amazon aren’t separate silos. Your TikTok marketing often actually boosts your performance on Amazon.
When your ads and content gains traction on TikTok, many people will go on Amazon to make their purchase. TikTok deserves that credit in your calculations.
Right now, it’s hard to draw links between TikTok views and Amazon sales. While you can use Amazon Attribution to track some link clicks, to evaluate the overlap between these channels you generally need to rely on cross-channel correlations.
If your TikTok spend and performance increases, you’ll probably see a subsequent sales boost on Amazon. This probably isn’t a coincidence—this is TikTok working its magic.
For what it’s worth, Intentwise makes it easy to track these multi-channel correlations.
We now have a suite of dashboards for TikTok Ads and TikTok Shop, which means you can see your TikTok performance in the same platform where your Amazon, Walmart, and Shopify data already lives. Easily toggle between dashboards to track high-level correlations.
Sign up for our waitlist now to get access to our TikTok dashboards and our reliable data pipelines for TikTok.
Misconception #2: “My Amazon team can just execute my TikTok strategy”
One of the biggest roadblocks to launching your TikTok strategy is figuring out who in your organization should own TikTok.
We know this part isn’t easy, especially if you have a small team. But there are a few common mistakes that we see brands make.
On one hand: no, you can’t just copy-and-paste your Amazon strategy onto TikTok. Because TikTok is a discovery platform, not a shopping platform, you’re going to stand out through unique content.
Your Amazon teams don’t necessarily have an eye for social content. Instead, if you have a social team, they might be the ideal people to take ownership of your TikTok strategy.
Or, if you’re short staffed, you might consider hiring an outside person to manage your TikTok content.
But be careful: while your Amazon team shouldn’t own TikTok end to end, you also don’t want to keep them in a separate silo from your TikTok team.
Because there is so much overlap between TikTok traction and Amazon sales, you need to ensure your Amazon team has an eye on what’s going on in your TikTok strategy.
Only then will you really be able to sleuth out what is working—and what isn’t—on TikTok.
#3. “I only need to work with a couple of affiliate partners”
The most common mistake we see on TikTok is when brands just don’t go big enough. Even if you’re thinking of TikTok predominantly as an experiment, if you really want to see results, you need to make your presence on the platform known.
Don’t just work with a couple of affiliates, and see what happens. If you want to see real benefits from TikTok, you need to be sending free samples to dozens, if not hundreds, of influencer partners.
TikTok is a platform where success compounds, and requires real scale.
Before you give up on TikTok Shop, you want to create a lot of original content, find a lot of affiliate partners, and balance it all out with paid ads.
And yes, the ads are a key component: we recommend amplifying the reach of your affiliates with ad spend, at least on those affiliates whose content is performing well.
For what it’s worth, Amazon makes it easy for you to identify Amazon affiliates on TikTok through the Amazon Associates Program. We wrote about how that works here.
