Is TikTok Shop the New Amazon?

If you saw our last video, ecommerce businesses are booming right now, but sometimes it can be hard to know where to start if you’re just getting into the industry. In this video, Matt gives his thoughts on whether or not TikTok shop is the best place to start.

There are tons of people out on social media giving business advice. Some of it is good advice, but most of it isn’t good. In this series watch CapForge’s owner react to different advice videos. He’s an expert in all things business and has 20+ years of experience under his belt. Some of the things he reacts to might even surprise you!

Video Transcript: 

Business Advice Video: 

Interviewer: Okay, Dave, so I want to start an online business in 2024. 

Interviewee: Yep.

Interviewer: What do you recommend? 

Interviewee: TikTok Shop hands down. It’s by far the biggest opportunity in 2024 and the reason why that is it’s a brand new ecommerce platform with lots of opportunity, zero competition at the comment. I’ll be very honest, you can come in start selling a product. You don’t have to worry about competing on price or ranking on page 1 and so on. You don’t need any prior ecommerce experience to get started with TikTok Shop. TikTok makes it really easy for someone that’s brand new to ecommerce to start making money with their platform. You don’t need that much startup capital honestly. You can start with only a couple hundred bucks with a business model called print on demand with TikTok Shop. And also you don’t need to have any TikTok followers yourself and you don’t need to shoot any TikTok videos yourself. And the reason why that is because you’re going to work with creators inside TikTok that are going to make videos of your product.

Matt’s Review:

Okay, yes a lot of people are starting TikTok shops. But there is no shortage of print-on-demand products that you can buy anywhere. And if you suddenly created some print-on-demand products, there’s no reason creators with large followings on TikTok are so they gonna wanna promote you over the 17 billion other choices that they have. So yes, TikTok is a relatively new ecommerce platform. And sometimes when new platforms come online with good user bases, there is a short window of opportunity to get in and start selling there before all the other competition rushes in and people figure it out. But the problem is, all the people who first discovered eBay, and then discovered Amazon, and then discovered Etsy, and then discovered Pinterest, and then discovered all the other things that they can, those people are not taking years to discover TikTok. They already know about TikTok. They’re already probably selling on TikTok. Some of them are making courses on how to sell on TikTok and already retired from selling on TikTok cause they’ve been doing it for a couple years already. So it really is back to the same basics of have something unique that people want, have an audience you’re pitching to, have a product that’s not the same as everyone else’s at a reasonable price, and have an audience that wants to buy it from you that you have control over or access to. Otherwise, you’re just throwing stuff up into the same giant whirling swirl of stuff to buy crap to buy online that everyone else is throwing stuff into. And you can do it and doesn’t cost that much but your chances of success are not great.