I pulled September's marketing costs for six shops we manage (this is data directly from TikTok Shop).
Same team. Same playbook.
One made $465,922. One made $31.
The big differences: how long the shop's been live, how many samples went out, and the product.
Time only counts if you're sending samples the whole way.
Last week I told you TikTok Shop is hard. This week I show the results……
(Want me to look at yours? Hit reply.)
The new shops marketing data looks impressive
Right up until you check the sales
Three of our shops are under two months old.
TikTok gives each of them a Marketing Efficiency ratio of about 6. That's $6 back for every $1 spent.
Their September sales? $31. $52. $210.
They look efficient because they're spending nothing. Nobody's posting yet, so there's nothing to put ads behind.
💡 A ratio of 6 on $31 of sales just means the shop hasn't started yet.
Then the ads switch on
Sales show up…. But so does the bill
One of our four month old shops made $8,298 in September.
It spent $11,123 on GMV Max to get there.
Add the fees and commissions and it's $1.55 out for every $1 in. Before you've paid for a single product.
The ads just had nothing good to run on. One creator made 86% of the affiliate sales. Hundreds of creator videos were never cleared for ads.
Our rule: 10 to 20 videos that already sell before you switch ads on. 50 to 100 before you scale.
We pushed for sales. Sales came. Profit didn't.
Same age. 14x the samples.
The two shops that prove it
Two of our shops are both about a year old.
Shop A sent 740 samples in September. It has about 2,000 creator videos a month to pick from. Ads cost it 6 cents per dollar of sales.
Shop B sent 52. Ads cost it 81 cents per dollar. All in, it spent more than it sold. Yeah……
The product matters too. One sells clothing, one sells food. They were never going to be the same size.
But a year in, the gap comes down to what the ads had to work with.
💡 Your ad budget is only as good as your sample budget.
Your “Affiliate Engine” needs to be serviced
We nearly proved it the hard way
Even Shop A slipped in September.
A flood of new creators got approved who'd never sold a thing.
Affiliate return went from 11x in July to 1.6x in September. Affiliate sales dropped a third in a single week.
Luckily, our agents flagged it, alerted the team and overhauling their outreach,
The long game, in numbers
What I'd tell a brand new shop
Months 0 to 2: samples and outreach. No ads. Sales will be tiny.
Months 3 to 6: ads only behind videos that already sell. Push harder than that and you'll pay more than you make.
Months 7 to 12: keep the samples going. This is where most brands quit.
Month 12+: if you never stopped sending samples, ads drop to single digit cents per dollar.
💡 You can't buy month 12 with month 2's ad budget.
Go send some samples.
- Paul 👊
What did you think of today's newsletter?
PS. Not sure which stage your shop's in? Hit reply and let’s chat