 Keep in mind, one thing I do want to mention here, um, so as you can kind of see on this chart right here, there's a big flat line and anyone listening that is getting interested in TikTok shop should probably listen to this. Today, I'm going to talk to two successful entrepreneurs who made over $75,000 in sales on TikTok shops just in the past month without spending a dime on marketing. We're going to talk about and show how they did it from finding winning products to fulfilling over 3000 orders per month and how everything connects together with automation, which helped them scale their store and achieve goals they never thought possible. I guarantee that what you're about to learn in this video is not available anywhere else. And these guys took time in their day to share their valuable knowledge and experience to help others succeed just as they did. So without further ado, let's jump straight into the action and see what happens when TikTok shops meets dropshipping and automation. Ali and Zach, thank you very much for being here today. First of all, how are you doing? Great. Thank you for asking. I hope you're doing pretty good, man. I appreciate you having us on. And I really appreciate that you guys are on here. So why don't you go ahead and tell me a little bit about yourself and what actually before we dive into it and show how everything works? What made you want to start dropshipping in the first place? So I I've been, you know, experimenting with a bunch of different methods with dropshipping since probably, I don't know, 2018, like all the way back to high school, you know, Facebook ads, TikTok organic, basically everything you could think of with little success, little profit margins and just, you know, school and all sorts of stuff, you know, just kind of put it to the sideline and then saw TikTok shop and was just like, all right, here we go. And it was kind of a culmination of all of my little different worlds. When you're saying Facebook ads and all that, you mean that you started on Shopify, right? Yeah, I was I started doing Shopify stores just blasting, you know, on Instagram ads, Facebook ads, all that kind of stuff. And then, you know, a couple of years off and then, you know, a new thing comes out, pop on that for a little bit. And this one just took off. So Shopify is the usual destination for beginner dropshippers. And what actually made you choose to transition into TikTok shops? So I had been seeing for some time, I think it got released in Indonesia and China as well first. And I had been seeing, you know, screen recordings and some of these lives and just some of the volume that some of these people were doing. And, you know, it's a no-brainer. They took away almost every friction point possible. And I, you know, we both live in LA and we're both very versed in, you know, the social media world as well as content creation. So it kind of just seemed like a no-brainer. And, you know, like I said, it was a culmination of some of the worlds that I operated and it was kind of all into one. So I really liked it and was very intrigued by it. And we've also seen your recent success with TikTok shops. And I think it's just amazing. And we're all going to dive into it soon and, you know, take a look. But when it comes to product research, this is one of the biggest pain points that people usually have right off the start. What products, you know, where can I find products that will actually sell and who's going to buy it and how do I know that it's trending? So when it comes down to product research, what's your strategy there? How does that work for you? So we go about it a couple of different ways. And truthfully, we don't have like a, you know, finite system that we use. We kind of use the term a dartboard. So, you know, using auto DS, we have the ability, you know, to really, you know, plug and play and really, you know, see what's working for that time. So what we usually like to do is we'll kind of go off of trends using Amazon and, you know, AliExpress and just see what's going with volume. And then, you know, a couple of videos, creatives here and there, we'll look at the analytics and then we deem something to be, you know, have interest or something like that. And then we just go balls to the wall with it. OK, OK, so you're starting off from like places like AliExpress best sellers, I don't know, drop shipping center, Amazon's best sellers, Movers and Jaker stuff like that. You see what's trending and you start to narrow it down from there. Yeah. And then another thing, too, that we've kind of noticed and Ali might get a little bit mad at me for saying this one out loud on this. But another thing that we've seen that seems to work extremely well, especially on Tiktok shop, just due to it being so early is we've actually spent a lot of time going back to articles from like, you know, 2016, 2017 and all of this stuff going, oh, you know, here are top upcoming drop shipping products for this year. And, you know, we rinse and repeat and they're working now on Tiktok shop. So some of these old products, you know, the tech might be a little revamped or, you know, something might be a little bit different about them. They seem to work very, very well. Yeah, because Tiktok shops is pretty much untapped territory at this point. It's completely new and especially drop shipping on it and also adding in automation, which I think is completely amazing. And I know that this is going to be like an estimate, an estimated number. But how many sales has your store been making recently? And what's your average profit percentage? Or how much do you mark up your prices from the source price? So I will go off the sales amount. And then Ali can talk about some of the the margins and the source price and stuff like that. So in the last week, we've done a little bit over 2,500 orders. We actually just officially crossed 100k grow sales in the last 30 days. Yesterday, I believe. So if you want to get into some of the like product margins, yeah, we go by doing that. Yeah. So with margins, we like to start off with lower margins. But right now we're sitting at around an average of 60% plus margins on most of the sales that we're getting. So it's pretty healthy. And our main goal is to always keep our margins over 20%. Yeah. Well, I'm glad that you're saying that I also don't go anywhere near 20%. I'm also around the 50, 60% profit margin range. So I'm glad that I'm also hearing other people say it and your sales are crazy. First of all, and I can validate it because we did take a look and it was just simply amazing. And really, I want to say good job to you guys. And let's just continue. So before I want to start screen sharing, I want to start showing people like how all of this works and how we can make everything connect together. But one second before that, quickly about automation and auto DS, how has that played a role in your success? Well, it's played a massive role. So auto DS has given us a really good competitive edge due to the fact that we can utilize Amazon's fulfillment system for our orders. And this is really important for Tiktok shop. And so far, because of you guys, we've been able to break some pretty impressive numbers because of it. We've had some issues here and there, but your guys's team has crushed them and we've been able to move through really smoothly when we when, you know, we first started doing Tiktok shop and so we had another product that blew up probably early early December, something like that. And at the time, we were still under the like the hundred order a day limit that Tiktok shop has. So, you know, we didn't have, you know, crazy volume. But, you know, we saw that there was an issue there and we kind of explored. And Ali found auto DS. And truthfully, I was extremely against it. I'm a very big like, OK, if you want things done right, do it yourself. Like all of that. Yeah. And, you know, we had some other, you know, unfortunate things happen and we'd never really got to like fully test it out. And then this happened. You guys have helped, you know, any minor inconvenience you guys have had and you guys proved me wrong entirely. So it's been very pivotal for us. So, so mainly for order automation and I got to admit I was there too. And when when the manage system first came out, and of course, I'm pitching the system, the software here and and and it's fine because I'm also a customer of the system itself before I, you know, started in auto DS myself. So the manager, one of the managers some came out. It really saved back in the day. It was about, I would say, maybe three years ago. It saved my ebay stores from from not being able to to process any of my orders once Amazon started locking my account. So when when you're mentioning the Amazon fulfillment system, we're talking about the fulfilled by auto DS feature, which simply automates all of your orders using auto DSes by our accounts. So you don't have to have your own and the tracking numbers get updated automatically and all of that. So you don't have to worry about accounts getting locked, which was the biggest issue a few years ago when we came up with this system where the orders get automated for you, not using your buyer accounts, not using your credit cards and your those buyer accounts and whatever else. So I'm glad, first of all, to see how it's been working for you guys. And OK, before we actually show it, and this is the part where if anyone here is listening from Spotify or Apple or anywhere else where you get your podcasts and you want to see what we're about to show, head over to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash auto DS search for this video and you will be able to see it. How does the process work? Technically, before we jump in and show, you know, the whole visualization. So what are the prerequisites? What are the apps that we need to make all of this automation work? There's a bit of a funny thing here. So with Tiktok shop, they haven't fully built out their system right yet. And so they're supposed to be able to integrate into Shopify very seamlessly, but they're not able to just yet. So the workaround that we found for this is we found some connector apps to Shopify that sync directly to Tiktok shop. And what they're able to do for us is they're able to allow us to connect our product listings on Tiktok shop directly to auto DS. And so with that, we can automate the fulfillment, syncing for the tracking numbers and for the order going into auto DS. So here we're talking about having a store on Shopify, having our Tiktok shop and also having auto DS, which connects to Shopify, which connects to auto DS. Exactly. And you're using connector apps because there is a connector app from Tiktok, but it's not working so well at the moment. It's brand new and there's a lot of bugs, so it's not really working well. Exactly. Yeah. A lot of people have had issues with that, including us. OK. And what's the name of the connector apps before we jump in? Yeah. So some of the good ones that we've worked with and used in the ones that we're using right now, one of them is own base, one of them is after ship. And I believe one of them is I forgot exactly what it's called, but it starts with a V. And if you guys go to Tiktok's website, they actually have a list of all the connector apps that you can use that they integrate with and partner with. And what's the role of each one? So after ship, own base and the other one that starts with a V, which we'll figure out soon. Their role is basically just to connect everything together, right? There it's like the middleman in between this operation that makes everything work and they all work identically the same. Some of them may have some different features, some different pricing points, some different packages, but they're all relatively the same. And what this allows you to do is so basically it links your Shopify store to your Tiktok store. And the reason that is important is because you then link your Shopify store to your Autodesk account. So whenever any orders placed on Tiktok go straight to Shopify through through after ship or one of those connector apps and then go straight to Autodesk. Tiktok shops to Shopify is being done with the connector apps and Shopify to Autodesk is being done with the Autodesk API to Shopify, which which that is like the connector app there. Can we use only one connector app? Or is it necessary to have all three of those that you mentioned? You can use only one. You do not need all three. Our favorite as of right now is after ship. We've had the least amount of problems with them. You know, sometimes with some of the other ones, you know, the inventory will get a little weird. So like it'll it'll switch the inventory number on you or something like something might be zero on Tiktok shop. And then it changes the number on Shopify. So we just like sticking with the after ship. This right here is our after ship. And this is where everything kind of starts. So the first step of it is obviously Tiktok shop, right? So you go to Tiktok shop, you list your products here. Once you've listed the products, you go into after ship. And what after ship will allow you to do is it'll allow you to actually sync the products directly to any product that you upload from Autodesk, right? So the first thing you want to do is you want to upload a product to Tiktok shop. Then you want to go to Autodesk and then upload a product through here, right? So once you've added the same product twice, right? Once through Tiktok shops and once through Autodesk, if I understand correctly. Exactly. And the connector app, the after ship is a Shopify app that you added through Shopify through the Shopify app store, right? Yeah. And then so once you've uploaded a product through Autodesk, you've set it up and you've imported it. It gets imported directly into your Shopify store. So now you have two separate products. You have one on Tiktok shop and you have one on your Shopify that's from Autodesk. Then what you do here is you use after ship and after ship will go ahead and link your product to the one on Autodesk. And once those two are linked, everything is automated. The orders automatically import into Autodesk and are fulfilled and the tracking numbers automatically sync right back into Tiktok shop. So after ship is doing the work of syncing what we have from Autodesk to Tiktok shops, if I understood that correctly. Exactly. OK, because we already have full automation between Autodesk and Shopify. So once you add a product to Autodesk, it'll just import directly also to your Shopify products page. So you or you added to Autodesk, it'll be on Shopify with price monitoring, stock monitoring and all of the other automation options. And on the other hand, after ship will connect that. And when I mean when I say that, I mean Autodesk and Shopify. After ship will connect that to we'll sync that with Tiktok shops. Exactly. So when an order comes in on Tiktok shops, it'll know what that product is on Shopify slash Autodesk. And it'll also make that connection. So when you get an order on Tiktok shops, you'll see it on your Shopify store and you'll also see it on your Autodesk order screen and then you're automating your orders through the Autodesk order screen. So you're not managing your orders through Shopify and not managing your orders through Tiktok shops. It's all being done and automated through the Autodesk order screen using fulfilled by Autodesk and order comes in, you send it out and it gets shipped automatically. Tracking information gets updated automatically on your Autodesk account as well as Shopify and then after ship will as we can also see right here. And then after ship will take the tracking from Autodesk slash Shopify and update that on your Tiktok shop store. Am I right? Yeah, exactly. OK, I'm still learning along the way. Like I didn't really understand this before. So that's why I'm repeating everything that you're saying. And hopefully it's also helping our viewers and listeners. So yeah, so I saw in the order. Yeah, so this is the Autodesk order screen and these are all orders from today, the last day in the last couple of days. And yeah, we can see it. Your orders are crazy. I see that you're using seasonal items and I'm sure that you've also got your evergreen again. I see that the process here and the progress is completely amazing. And what you're doing is you're simply into what we call an untapped territory. And we had the same with all other selling channels. Like, you know, eBay had its golden age. I think it was around seven years ago and anyone who was dropshipping on eBay was making like and that's what's happening right now on Tiktok shops. And again, I think it's completely amazing, completely great. Everything is also being automated for you. And like you said, like before that, Zach, you were like and I was like that for a long time. Like, I don't know how long you were in that mindset, but I was in that mindset for a long time. Like, why is automation when we can do it manually? OK, yeah, it takes more time, but we're saving the monthly package and we're saving time or we're saving money, but you're not actually saving money because you're consuming your time and into that. And then you can't really scale once you're doing everything manually. Scaling is pretty much out of the question or there's like a limit to how much you can do, right? I mean, can you process more than 50, 100 orders per day manually? And even if you do so, then you're not spending that time back into product research and growing your business. Yeah, exactly. Yep. The app as we saw after ship what is something that we can get for how much is shop not shopify after ships subscription? What are we looking at there? Currently right now, we're paying around 500 a month. It's right around that range and it varies based on how many orders you're doing per month. The base subscription is I believe 29.99. It's no more than 40 dollars a month, but we're just at the point now where, you know, like he said, the volume is at the highest right here. Yeah, so you got you're on the essentials 4k plan, 4,000 orders per month and you're just over half that and the month has just begun. So you're probably going to have to upgrade this subscription soon because you're continuing to scale very nicely. And Zach, you were saying that the first subscription starts at twenty nine dollars. And that's concerning after ship. And we need that for all of the automation to work. Yep. Mm hmm. OK, OK. And you're saying that the other apps are also useful, but you're mainly using after ship because that's the one that's doing the connections the most seamlessly. Let's just put it that way. Yeah, we just the other two, you know, it's, you know, momentary, just unlinked, you know, you get five orders at that time. They don't even exist in auto DS and just little issues. So we went with after ship. OK, and how do people actually see your products? Like once it's on TikTok shops, how do you how does your target audience get in front of that product? When we kind of were doing research and diving into all of this, it seems like a lot of people are very, very affiliate based and they're very, you know, UGC creators and all of that. You know, as I mentioned before, we both live in LA. He used to make a lot of content himself. And, you know, I'm surrounded by a lot of content creators. So we kind of just said, you know, let's get rid of the extra cost and let's just see what we can do between, you know, the two of us and his girlfriend and a couple other friends of ours and just put content together. And that's what we did. It worked very, very well. And, you know, it's very it's a lot of testing with the TikTok. We really kind of try and rely on the TikTok organic algorithm, because there's just nothing that beats that, in our opinion. Yeah, yeah, that's just amazing. And again, I'm glad that you're saying that because this is another one of the things that I keep, you know, stressing recently is, you know, we're done with the age where to test a product you have to put, you know, have to create five dollars, ten dollars, fifteen dollars a day ad sets and see which one is going to work best and then scale the one that's working, turn off the ones that are not working, create different hooks for the ones that are working and keep putting money into it until you actually see some, you know, cells. And then those cells need to actually turn into a profit because you need to return on your ads and your investment. And that takes time. You need a really good product and you need the really good timing for it and you need really good marketing for that product. Whereas today we can simply do it using your, you know, TikTok organic, which means order the product to your house. So it's going to cost you however much that product costs. But then you can shoot as many videos as you want. It doesn't cost money to post those videos on TikTok. See which one of those videos work. And now you already tested the market into what hooks actually work and what, you know, video the audience actually resonates with. And then you can just keep, you know, doubling down on that. So that is your strategy. You're just making organic videos on the products link in bio. They click on that and then they get to your website and purchase. Well, so there's with the, we just tagged the product in the individual video for TikTok shop. And here we're looking at the analytics of your TikTok shops on your TikTok seller center of the last I see. What is that for the last month? OK. Yeah, so keep in mind one thing I do want to mention here. So as you can kind of see on this chart right here, there's a big flat line and anyone listening that is getting interested in TikTok shop should probably listen to this. So from the fourth all the way to the 19th, we were banned for basically no reason. I don't want to, you know, you know, dog on TikTok shop, but for basically no reason. And we were unable to basically get any response or reason as to why from TikTok shop, why that happened. Luckily enough, about two weeks after we got in contact with somebody that was able to help us. But I just want to say anyone that is looking to get into this, you need to make sure that you're doing everything correct and as best as to your ability because they will ban you with no cause. And they will hold your money for 90 days and it will put you in a very, very bad situation. Yeah. So just I just wanted to say that very quickly because we've had a lot of issues with that. And it's not fun when, you know, you spend $30,000 on product and then they just ban it and hold all the money. So yeah, not not a fun experience. I just want to put that in there. One thing it's really like to keep in mind is if you think of like Stripe and how like they'll ban you for going over their chargeback rate, TikTok is exactly the same. So they have a lot of KPIs and key performance. Yeah. So they have a lot of key performance indicators here, right? And so if you don't meet these, they do have the right to ban you. And if any of you guys are experienced with Amazon and Amazon's policies and how that works, it's very similar. They have the right to ban you. They have the right to hold your funds. And they also have the right to deduct anything that they'd like from your funds. So these things are really important to keep in mind. You guys can see, so it's been, you know, over a month now, since we've been on banned and we're still building up our shop score because it was impacted that much from that account suspension. And like we said before, we didn't actually violate any guidelines or anything. The account ban that happened for us was an algorithmic one that happened due to like a small reason. And their system at the time had a lot of issues and they accidentally had banned thousands of TikTok shops on the same day. So their support system was flooded and it was nearly impossible to get our account back. Luckily, we're able to. And then the other thing I also wanted to mention here is TikTok shops finances and accounting are really interesting. So you guys can see here, we said earlier that we did over $100,000 in revenue in the last 28 days, but it doesn't reflect here. And the reason for that is because they have a reimbursement system and also a promotional system where they're giving out a lot of coupons to customers. They are doing a lot of stuff with shipping fees. And so because that sometimes the revenue that you're actually getting won't amount to what you have. But you've actually earned at the end of it, if that makes sense. And when they reimburse the buyers, are they doing it on the seller's expense? No, they're doing it their expense. But the issue is that sometimes they might not reimburse you. And so that is definitely something to keep in mind. And it's very good to not include that in your margins, if that makes sense. So this is one of the pain points of selling on marketplaces is that you actually have to learn how to put up with these suspensions. They're mostly temporary suspensions. But guys, if this was easy work, there would be no value in it. And everybody would be able to do it so well. Suspensions is something that we have to just learn to put up with, find their support, find that representative that we can talk to that can actually help us show them what we're doing. And that's pretty much it. That usually does it. But sometimes it just takes a little bit of effort. Like you said, they banned a whole bunch of accounts on the same day. And so that then they got a whole bunch of responses, a whole bunch of new tickets in their support system, and it took them a while. But I'm glad to see this and that you guys have picked it up again and that you guys got it reinstated because from here, the only way to go is up. And that's one of the pain points in scaling. Like you mentioned, also payment systems want to make sure that there's not too many chargebacks. And this is one of the things where companies scale, they have to just simply put up with it. So again, thank you very much for showing us this. It was all really good information. And I'm going to ask you a few more really important questions. So you already mentioned one of them, but what are some of the most common mistakes or pitfalls that you experienced along the way? And how did you overcome them, except for that suspension, which we just talked about? What's something else that you guys can think of that can help others? I mean, I say another one is probably about a month and a half ago after our first TikTok shop product had gone. We were actually in Vegas at the time. And one of our this was prior to auto DS and one of our Amazon buy accounts just got banned with probably 150 to 200 orders. We then had to spend the entirety of the night cleaning that entire mess up. So yeah, that was one of the way to process your orders. You had a lot of orders to process and no way to process them. Yep. Yeah. And then due to TikTok shop where, you know, under strict shipping times and stuff like that. So it's just stress, stress, stress. Yeah. What kind of tracking numbers do you have to upload to TikTok shops so that they can recognize your tracking information? USPS, PS, FedEx, DHL, Amazon. You can even use Amazon logistics, which is the TBA tracking numbers that are not trackable unless you're using the buyer account. OK. Exactly. Lasership on track. That's all the international ones. OK, cool. So they actually they're actually able to track all those tracking carriers. OK, nice. What are TikTok's selling fees? How much are they taking off from each transaction? OK, so then over here, you guys can we'll show you guys one of the statements here so you can kind of get a look into the buyer. But 1045 is what you get to keep. There's the referral fee, 30 cents per order plus 2 percent and the sales tax, which is paid by the buyer and then paid to TikTok. OK, cool. One note to is their fee is going up in the upcoming months. I believe they're increasing it to 4 percent. And then I believe they're doing another increase to 8 percent. Is that is that right? I'm not sure about that. Yeah, we're not 100 percent sure. It'll be all over the place. Yeah, well, OK, well, they got to see how they're going to grow. First, they want to get as much sellers as they can. So they're making the fees super low and then slowly they're going to start increasing it as the seller starts to come in. That makes sense. Other marketplaces also did the same. OK, really cool. Thanks for showing us that, too. Yeah, I'm going to wrap it up. I think we've got more than enough info here. What suppliers do you use? This is a question that I didn't ask you. I did see that you're using Amazon. Is that the only supplier that you're using? Yes, as of right now. OK, and that's because you're getting the easy order fulfillment where you don't really need to worry about the buyer account. So it makes it very practical. So that makes sense. Customer service, when they reach out to you. So when the customers reach out to you, that's done on TikTok shop. So you have to like enter your shop every day and see what messages you have. Yeah, so luckily we just have notifications on. You know, you can delegate that with other people and stuff like that. A few of the VA or something like that. It's very, very simple. Tiktok makes it pretty easy. And last question to wrap this up. First of all, thank you very much. But what is the best? Not but, but what is the best advice that you would give to someone who's just starting off like right now? I know we gave a lot of tips here, but think about everything that you went through. Someone is starting off right now. They listen to this podcast. They're going to sign up to AutoDS slash Shopify slash TikTok through after ship, what's some of the things that we didn't mention in this video that you think they need to know right off the bat in order to, you know, ensure a more streamlined process. Product market fit. That's like a very, it's a general business thing, but it's probably one of the most important things here on Tiktok shop and being able to kind of find the right audience for your product and matching those two together is probably one of the key components of this. And that's probably where a lot of people are going to be going wrong when it comes to them starting off, especially if they're new to e-commerce, if they're new to business, they're new to marketing. That's maybe one of the biggest things. Now, another thing is with Tiktok. This is really important. They're constantly changing the platform right now and it's going through extensive changes. So almost every single day when me and Zach sign on, there's something new on there and, you know, they move things around. And so it's a very fast growing platform and it's still a pretty good time to enter. It's not too late or anything like that, but it's very important to be able to adapt and to be able to keep moving forward even as things change because there have been some good changes and also some negative ones that have actually impacted our business in a negative way. And so adaptability, I'd say, is one of the most important things as well. Mine is just start. So get your information, just do it. Take action. We're very different. I'm a very just jump into the fire and figure it out person. But just start with calculated risk. You know, you don't want to be too exposed, but just get going. And you have, if I showed you some of the videos that have made us a lot of money and the people watching would be like, what the hell is going on? I promise you, just start. Do your research. Make sure you got your ducks in a row and stop real quick with the analysis paralysis and take action. Even if you make mistakes, it's fine. Keep going at it. Stay consistent. And that's what's going to help you make it at the end of the day. I completely agree with that. And also everything with that. You said Ali, guys, thank you very much. This was a really very resourceful session. And I'm sure that a lot of people are going to get a lot of a lot of value from it. Guys, let us know in the comments below if you're watching this on YouTube. Let us know what you thought. Thank you again, guys, for your time. I really appreciate it. And I wish you the best of luck with everything that you do, not only on TikTok shops, but also all of the future projects that you take on. Thanks again for your time. Thank you, man. Thank you guys so much for all your help. You guys are the best. Thank you.