TikTok Shop: Successes and Challenges

Let’s catch up with Eugene Wong, an accomplished 8-figure Amazon and 7-figure Walmart seller, as he shares the latest developments in his thriving e-commerce empire. Eugene not only walks us through the intricacies of managing his expanding businesses but also reveals his secrets to maintaining a healthy work-life balance, turning personal hobbies into profitable business ventures, and exploring new income streams. 

Join us as Eugene discusses his journey into the world of TikTok Shop, where he has successfully launched products. Plus, get a sneak peek into the brands incubated by his dedicated employees and learn about the innovative system changes and automation he’s implementing in his business systems. This episode is a goldmine of entrepreneurial wisdom for anyone looking to diversify their income streams outside E-commerce selling and thrive in the ever-evolving online seller landscape.

In episode 489 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Eugene discuss:

• 02:52 – Eugene Shares Updates On His Business
• 03:44 – His Healthy Habits And Habits Outside The Amazon Grind
• 06:13 – Let’s Talk About Sports Cards From Hobby To Business
• 09:13 – Problems, Balance, & Boundaries For The Main And Side Businesses
• 13:54 – “You Need To Think Of What Your Hobbies Are”
• 15:43 – Diversifying Your Income Streams
• 18:00 – Launching Brands Incubated By His Employees
• 20:54 – Let’s Talk About TikTok Shop
• 24:32 – Browsing Eugene’s TikTok Shop
• 28:03 – TikTok Is Banning Amazon Links?
• 29:49 – Business System Changes He Is Implementing
• 33:03 – Eugene’s 60-Second Tip

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got an eight-figure Amazon seller slash seven-figure Walmart seller back on the show, who’s gonna have a little bit different kind of episode. We’re gonna talk a lot about how, as entrepreneurs, maybe we can take a hobby of ours and turn it into an alternate income stream, as well as how he’s launched on TikTok shop. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Are you browsing a Shopify, Walmart, Etsy, Alibaba, or Pinterest page? And maybe you see a cool product that you wanna get some more data on? Well, while you are on those pages, you can actually use the Helium 10 Chrome extension Demand Analyzer to get instant data about what’s happening on Amazon for those keywords on these other websites. Or maybe you wanna then follow up and get an actual supplier quote from a company on alibaba.com in order to see if you can get this product produced. You can do that also with the Helium 10 Demand Analyzer. Both of these are part of the Helium 10 Chrome extension, which you can download for free at h10.me/extension. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got back on the show for the second time, a very, very serious seller here Eugene. Eugene, how’s it going, man?

Eugene:

Hi, what’s up Bradley? Doing very well. Glad to be back.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, so, so guys, you, Eugene has sold multiple eight figures on Amazon, seven figures on Walmart. If you want to get his full backstory you’re gonna want to go to episode 306. All right. So h10.me/306 to get a lot of how he grew up and what his parents wanted them to do, and then the kind of direction that he went to. Quite an interesting story. We’re not gonna go too much there, but you know, that, that was almost a couple years ago. Now it’s like pulling teeth to get Eugene to come on podcast. He’s so humble and he doesn’t like I don’t have much to say. I’m like, dude, you sold a hundred million dollars, few, $300 million online. Anything you say is interesting. So finally we got him back after two years at Eugene on the show. Welcome back and how, how are things been going with you?

Eugene:

Things are good, and happy to be back. Lots of changes to update you on.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool, cool. Now, right off the bat, Let’s just talk about on the business side of things, numbers, just raw numbers, 2021, we are still kind of in Covid and things. And 2023 at the end here. Things have changed, better, worse, whatever the case is. How are your numbers on Amazon and Walmart compared to a couple of years ago?

Eugene:

So, I think last time when we first last spoke on the episode I projected, I think 18 million, and we were pretty much right there at the end of the year. So it wasn’t surprising. Like we kind, kind of forecasted 18 to 20 and we fell into the lower tier of that. But we hit our target, so we were happy with that, we hit it.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Would you say Walmart and Amazon have grown or stayed around the same amount, or have both been increasing in a similar way, different ways? How’s the trajectory been?

Eugene:

Well, actually, Walmart got worse for us. Amazon is the one that increased Walmart to spread got even wider, which were, I mean, it’s, it’s something that we continue to batch our heads over, and we’re trying to still crack the code, but it went down. Yeah. Which stinks.

Bradley Sutton:

And now we’re gonna get maybe into some strategies that you can share with us that you or your team is doing on the business side. But I want to take a step back and go outside completely outside of the business side. Right now this wasn’t a big focus of mine when I had you on the podcast two years ago, but if you’ve listened to the podcast anytime in the last year, you’ll see that I, I ask almost every guest, like, Hey, what do you do to take yourself out of the business as far as for you know, hobbies and as far as health routine and et cetera. So let’s start, I know a lot of what your hobbies are, so let me start on the part that I don’t know about. What are you doing to stay physically fit, healthy? You know, like, you seem like you’re a pretty fit person when I see you, so you you’re not just sitting in front of a computer eating junk food all day. Do you do the gym or do you walk, or what are you doing to stay fit?

Eugene:

Unfortunately, or admittedly, I don’t really do too much physical activity right now because of, because of my hobbies and the work, right? I mean, obviously eat eating healthy well try to. But there’s not much like I don’t go to the gym too much anymore. I do help out with my kids’ sports that they’re in, football and soccer. So that keeps me pretty active, I guess that’s probably my main source of exercise.

Bradley Sutton:

And what else are you doing? You know for hobbies you like, like, I know, I know you’re big on Lego and stuff the family, like, you still doing projects like that, or what else?

Eugene:

Lego, actually if you wanna buy some, I have a lot for sale, but, Lego, I didn’t fully quit, but, but I’m downsizing that because I just don’t have time for it. I do a lot of surprisingly, I mentioned this also when I was at Sell and Scale sports cards, right? I had my eyes on that, that business model. And good or bad for me, whenever I get involved with something, I always look for the business angle, right? Not, not about money per se. It just, it just like finding the passion in it and sports cards. Not sports cards.

Bradley Sutton:

Hold that thought. I’m gonna share my screen of something that I was involved in yesterday here. Oh, no. Now, now just explain like, kind of like what’s going on. These are your hands we’re looking at in this video right here. And you’re opening up these pack of cards. I see your name right here.

Eugene:

You drips my name.

Bradley Sutton:

So this was a live Facebook. Explain like you’re doing commentary on what’s going on here, explain what we are looking at right here. Oh

Eugene:

My gosh, I can’t believe clip that. I’m turning red right now. Yeah, so, so that’s that’s, that’s part of the sports cards part. It’s pretty much, that’s called braking. So, pretty much nowadays, this is not like your, your childhood sports cards. Nowadays, boxes can cost 500,000, even $10,000. It’s sickening. But a cheaper way to jump in is, is you can get your team. So let’s say you like the Philadelphia Eagles, and instead of buying the whole box and ripping every single pack yourself and paying the full price, you can just buy one team and you get all the cards for the Eagles. If you’re a fan of the Eagles or if you want to gamble, which is kind of one of the elements to it. So I’ve I’ve evolved from, from being a pure hobbyist into kind of like collecting and ripping product and opening basketball and football stuff to evolving into breaking, because I saw the business side of it, and it’s very fun.

Eugene:

It gets me outta my element. It’s actually a very stress reliever for the Amazon side of business. In fact, I need it. Like, I need an outlet like that. It’s very creative outlet, because I have to first of all sell and engage an audience which is complete against my, my my personality. Like, I’m a super introvert, like, being on here, you had to rich, you twist my arm, but, yep. But I dunno, something about the sports cards. I’m just very comfortable with it. I’m very knowledgeable with it, and I like helping people most importantly.

Bradley Sutton:

You started as a, on the hobby side, like, you would go into Facebook groups and like join the breaks as a person who would buy like a certain player or a certain team. Is that correct? Or did you start immediately on the flip side where like, I’m gonna make this a business from day one?

Eugene:

No, no, no. I definitely wasn’t the business from day one. I was basically gambling, right. I was, I was opening the packs myself and, and, and paying in other people’s breaks, but it wasn’t sustainable. Yeah. I knew that entertainment was not a sustainable form of–.

Bradley Sutton:

But it was like a rush, right? Like it’s a rush. Like, guys, let me tell you, you from experience, like I’ve been doing this for years too, and it’s fun. Like for those who aren’t into sports cards maybe it’s kind of hard to describe what we are talking about here, but it’s super fun. But what I like about this is that you took something that was an escape on the side like a little hobby. And then you’re like, wait a minute, I could actually turn this into maybe even a side business where you’re still doing your hobby, but now instead of the money just going out and you paying it, it’s almost like maybe you’re breaking even now. So you still get that rush and that escape from your Amazon business, but you’re almost able to turn it into a side business. Because the way it works is this, this is not easy work, first of all, to organize this break, collect payment from like 20 strangers to, and then later organize the cards to different teams. But, but that’s kind of like built into the, built into the price, right? So are you kind of like breaking even on this now, but you’re still able to get that rush that you did when you were just a pure hobbyist?

Eugene:

I mean, in the beginning when you first start out, when you don’t have any, you don’t have reputation, no one knows you. Yeah. You, you might be losing money or breaking even, but I mean, again, I’m humble, but it’s hard for me to say this, but like, I built quite a following and, you know what I mean? I snap fill my, or I’m using the wrong terminology. I fill my pretty quickly. And usually a lot of people struggle. And I’m in a group that has a hundred thousand people and I’m probably one of the larger ones. And the stuff fails ’cause people trust me, my reputation’s there. I’m not one of these like, shady guys and I know what I’m doing. So reputation’s everything in this industry, just like Amazon as a brand, you know what I mean? Like one big mistake or, or one, like one shady element will take you down. And this literally is the most sensitive hobby where it will, you will, your name will be tarnished forever if you, if you mess up in a shady way.

Bradley Sutton:

You slip a good card out or something, something like that. Now how much time a week are you spending on this I guess we could call it side business/hobby.

Eugene:

Probably too much time. And, and I think this, this is a good, good blend of the Amazon and, and what we like the business aspect. It’s one of those things where, where I struggle with balance and boundaries, right? So I know I’m sitting on a gold mine with my hobby that turned into something. Now the problem is the scaling and hiring of people and hiring talent that goes live as well as capital to source product and stuff like that. So it, it’s a very similar business problem to the Amazon side, but of course I’m more passionate about it. But also it let, let’s, let’s be honest, it’s not gonna generate the profit that it does on the, for the Amazon business, right? Sure, sure. So I have to be realistic and real, real things in.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you have employees for this endeavor then as well?

Eugene:

I’m interviewing right now.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. But right now, until now, you’ve kind of just done it all on your own.

Eugene:

Yeah, yeah. Okay. For, it’s been a year over, a little over a year and a month.

Bradley Sutton:

But then, but then we talking 20 hours a week, 10 hours a week, 30 hours a week. How much would you say you’re spending on the baseball cards or sports cards?

Eugene:

Maybe 20. Okay.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Now, when that happened, does that mean that you, it was 20 hours less on the Amazon side? Or is it a mixture since this it’s kind of not like to me, when, when I do sports card stuff, and, and I, I’m very similar to you. I was in the sports card. I’m actually flying to Japan in a few days. ’cause I’m setting up at a card show to sell some of the stuff that, that, that I have over here and over there. So I get it. To me it’s, it’s work. It makes money just like you’re profitable on this, but it’s also fun. It’s also an escape. So, so did, did you decrease your Amazon workload by 20 hours? Or is it kind of a mixture? You maybe only took away 10 hours or something because this is kind of like a hobby as opposed to just business for you?

Eugene:

I don’t think the 20 hours replaced 20 hours of Amazon. I mean, I guess the balance definitely took away some from the Amazon. And, and of course my guys are, are solid, and I know they kept things going. But of course, there’s some things that fell by the wayside, right? It’s, I normally don’t miss, and I admittedly like, this is why I need to balance, this is not the golden goose right now. It can be. But I need to find a way to develop it without hurting the main golden goose, right? So, so that, that’s, I’m, I’m living through it right now and trying to balance that out. It’s just that I, I can’t, I don’t wanna give it up because it took almost a year to build this up into this thing. And now, now I know there’s another level to climb, but, but I’m not at the stage where I can say, Hey, I’m 100% all in still on that because I can’t give up the Amazon side.

Bradley Sutton:

Wait a minute. Are you the one who also had a huge eBay account where you’re also selling the cards on eBay?

Eugene:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Y you were the one who made all those listings, or

Eugene:

No, that was, alright, now you’re gonna make me give away the secrets here. That account was, we used to sell very heavy on eBay. Okay. So we, we sold, this is before like, we got heavy into apparel. We were selling electronics and, and,

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, okay.

Eugene:

Yeah. So

Bradley Sutton:

When you say we, this is like your, your, your main conglomeration the, the same business that you’ve been doing for 15 years. This wasn’t as okay. Now it’s starting to, to come into picture a little bit more. Now you

Eugene:

Gave this Yeah it looks like that. It looks like it, like 500,000 sports card sales, but it, it’s not, yeah. But I’m starting to, because assignment model is potentially in the works as well too, but that’s a whole another infrastructure.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Yeah. So guys, I mean, the reason why I brought this up wasn’t just because I think this is cool that, that he does sports cards like me there’s a few people in the industry like Brandon Young and Mitul Patel, and a bunch of people of us are all in like this group where we, we talk about sports cards and stuff like that, but it’s the fact that think about what your hobbies are. And you can’t apply this to everything, but there’s a lot of you out there who might have a hobby, and this is kinda like the Gary Vee mentality actually, where it’s like, can you actually monetize the hobby where it’s not just a complete dream? Like if my hobby is swimming or something like that like if I’m, if you hobby was swimming and you’re like, I’m gonna start swimming for 20 hours a week, it’s kind of, it might be hard to monetize that per se but for the rest of you guys out there, actually I’m, I’m sure I could come up with something like maybe I become a swimming influencer or something.

Bradley Sutton:

Something like live streamer, I’m sure there’s, but, but, but that’s my point. Like a lot of it, even if it, even if it seems extreme guys, is there’s ways where you can turn some of your side side hobbies or, or things into almost like a side business where you are getting that escape from your day-to-day. Amazon, which is what I’ve been preaching for the last year, guys you have to have hobbies and things that take you away from the daily grind you know, resets your mind and, and just puts you in a different space. But at the same time, you gotta be careful that if you’re just like like one of my hobbies is Korean, Korean dramas. Like I just watch Korean dramas all day. I could if I had the time, but that there’s no monetization for me on that, that means it’s literally just taking away time from, from my, my, my Amazon businesses if I just go deep into it.

Bradley Sutton:

So you’ve gotta have the balance, but then think about it like, is part of, of this hobby is there a way to monetize it where not only would you break even, but now all of a sudden you’ve got another profitable business like Eugene has here with a sports card. So I, to me, it’s fascinating what you’ve been able to do, but again, you would not have been able to get to the point where you could even do this if you did not build up your team in a good way and be able to delegate so much of your Amazon business to your team.

Eugene:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think my, my role had had evolved, and this is probably the past couple years, is that you gotta let the team do their thing, right? And my role now has become, okay, how do I make sure the team has a secure future? I have to branch out and go outside of the box and do different things, right? I’ve, I think there’s, there’s been other failed attempts at things whether, whether it’s an Amazon type of type of business or outside of completely outside separate from e-commerce type of business. And you know what I mean I’m always looking for new ways to generate income, right? And that’s more in general to diversify, which is very important I think not only within Amazon, but even outside of having Amazon as a business and then having, I don’t know, own something else, going to real estate, anything else, right? Sports cards, whatever. And that’s another way to protect my family, not not only my like personal life, but like more, like I said, the guys here that, that they deserve. They’re running the day-to-day, they deserve something to take home at the end of their whatever tenure or yearly bonuses and things like that. So that, that’s very important to have that opportunity.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, let’s switch back from, from hobby back to business now. How many brands overall do, are you currently running?

Eugene:

We only have three brands, right? And it’s all under the same account we have.

Bradley Sutton:

So let’s say like these three brands are selling on Walmart, you’re selling on Amazon and maybe have some.com websites or something for them.

Eugene:

Yeah, they’re not all on the same marketplaces. Some have their own website. Some are on multi-platform, some are just on single platform. Okay.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Alright. Any, anything, like, have you launched any new brands or have any new things in the pipeline or that you’ve done lately?

Eugene:

Yeah, we something that, and again, this is a a situation from one of our employees. It was kind of incubated by them, which I loved. And basically a pitch came across my desk with one of my employees. I’m like, Hey, like, what do you wanna talk about? And they had this great idea, the conceptual it was and they have like anxiety and ADHD, which which they struggle with. And they had a, a concept, a product concept that would help with that. And the mission statement, the vision, it resonated with me. Obviously required an investment. There was a risk there because this was not our lane. This is definitely not apparel or electronics that we were used to.

Eugene:

This is like basically it’s a weighted, weighted lap pad, right? But it was, it’s really made for kids. The ones on market just were not, were not as good, right? The quality or, or, or the way the, the, the weights are shifting inside and stuff like that. So internally we developed a better way to do it a better weight system. We also have ones that are custom. We have like a dog as well too. This is, this is a dog, and you can fill this with whatever you want. Rice or, or glass bees. We have a, we have a unicorn. So like, that’s the new brand that we’re, we’re trying to invest in slowly. We’re not trying to sink all our chips in that, because that can really hurt us long term, right?

Eugene:

So we’re trying to play that out, that just launched this year. And it wasn’t, it’s not one of those like products that we’re used to where we’re used to selling, let’s say like five, 10, 20,000 units of it a year, and then okay, wins and repeat. This is a definitely a lot smaller niche, but this was a passion project by someone internally that I committed to these guys. Like, look guys, if you have passion projects, let’s let’s discuss it. Let’s talk about it. Right? I can’t say yes to everything. However, there’s certain ones that we can’t bring aboard. This is one of them that passed the initial phase, and now it’s all the way through. And this is kind of one of our first brands that we really made like full effort of full branding, not how we, like, HD is like a, was like a mix of stuff.

Eugene:

And while it’s getting better now, it’s really focused on apparel. It didn’t start that way. This was our first clean brand that was fully immersed into this concept. And we have a, a future plans for sensory types of items for it as well too. We have workbooks we have influencers. It’s more of a lifestyle brand. But it’s one of those that it’s gonna be capped it. I don’t think it’s gonna be ever one of those $20 million a year things, at least I don’t think, but of course there’s, there’s future plans. We wanna do trade shows and, and pension get on shelves, Walmart well target probably more, more so. But but that’s, yeah, that’s one of the exciting things that we have in the pipeline is just, it just we gotta be patient and drive it the right way. Because you can burn through resources, especially PPC, PPC is if you don’t do it right, you can really hurt yourselves. And, and we, we’ve been in that boat a couple times already this year.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, I’ll very unique. I never heard about I mean, I’m sure people, people have it, but I haven’t had a guess that, that have said, Hey, we had a internal kind of where the employees could, could come up with ideas. You know, you have employees who, who have been with you five, 10 years, they know the business. All the ideas for new products doesn’t have to come from the owner you. So that’s cool to open up ideas and be open that to that who knows how much stuff your employees out there might have might have some ideas about some new products. Okay. TikTok shop is something that I think has grown exponentially as far as buzz around it. We’ve had other Helium 10 Elite members like Elizabeth talk about some of their some of her amazing success in TikTok shop. Are have you taken any of your brands in TikTok shop? Are you utilizing that or just influencers at all in TikTok?

Eugene:

Yeah, we we actually just started we we’re really late to the game, I think, well, I think we’re late to the game obviously in China. I mean, they have factories that are just going li like live factories, literally. Like, there’s cubicles of people going live which is crazy, and the amount of money that brings in is disgusting. So we finally made the leap in using our HD clothing brand to jump onto TikTok shop or TikTok live and TikTok shop. That’s how it evolved. So so the minute that opened to us, we didn’t get invited to the first round of it during the beta but as soon as it opened up to us, we gave it a trial. We put some listings up and right away we got some sales, which is cool.

Eugene:

And when we stocked out on TikTok shop, the sales went to our website as well too. So, so we got double wham, we got bonus sales on our website, which we never really get, like our website just to have a website, to be honest with you. We don’t focus on it. But we got sales there and TikTok shop. And then when we went, when we did more TikTok lives, we connected with more, more creators. And that went viral as well too on a couple posts, and we sold out a lot of our stuff. Now, the, the bad part is we were not prepared at all for the inventory. Like, we’re prepared for inventory for Walmart, Amazon, and that’s really it, right? And then now with TikTok in the mix, those sales are very unpredictable. We can’t say that, hey, just because that, that influencer posted that content that it’s gonna sell a hundred dresses in two days, we don’t know that.

Eugene:

So, like, I don’t even know how the heck to order for that. So it’s a problem we’re trying to figure out right now without like blowing the budget on, on over ordering inventory for a chance. So we usually pretty tight with inventory. We don’t like taking too many chances, especially with apparel. Apparel, you get stuck with it, you’re in trouble. So, so it’s a good and bad problem to have. So, so we’re also just like peace pets. We’re, we’re not taking a, a gung-ho approach where we’re just gonna throw everything at it. We just gotta take our time and learn some of the, the growing pains. And of course, TikTok shop has growing pains. I’m not an expert at it, but like, I’ve heard enough horror stories that there’s a lot of I think internal things that, that are not just like when I say Walmart or Amazon when they first started, there’s a lot of things that don’t go right.

Eugene:

For, for both the seller and the buyer. Things can be abused and manipulated. So so there’s a lot of that stuff that, that, that happens still, but but it’s definitely gonna be the future for sure. And, and I, I’m investing in that more and more each day. Obviously I think all brands should go on there. Clothing I think is actually a very easier thing because we just have a model that talks about it and wears it and walks around in it, right? And demonstrates it. That’s pretty easy.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, so I’m here looking at your TikTok channel here. ShopHDE I see you’ve got a few videos here. Lemme just pull up one, enhance performance and style. Okay, so I see here, there’s a, a shop button. I’m gonna hit this. I’m gonna hit this shop button, and let’s see where it takes me to, ah, okay. So it just takes me like, I can just instantly I add it to the cart and then have this. It’s kind weird looking leopard skin shorts here shipped to me. That’s that easy as that. This is like my first time looking at, at TikTok shop, and then I can actually go click here directly to your shop and I can see all of your products, I’m assuming. Okay. And I can see best sellers. Looks like your tennis outfit is the top sellers here. Actually, it’s all women’s clothes, like your men’s. That just shows you that, that I guess more women are using TikTok shop, perhaps, because none of your men’s products are, are on this bestseller list here. That’s interesting.

Eugene:

Yeah, men don’t like to shop on TikTok. Apparently. We found that out early on.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. Okay. So now all of this this is your channel here. These, these aren’t your employees, like, are like, are these influencers here who have done all are these, like, what do you call it? Is this UGC or are some of these your actual employees or people you have hired to do videos? What are we looking at here?

Eugene:

It’s a mix of, I mean, we, one should be one of our employees. It’s a mix of influencers as well as our, our our models in China that makes some of the videos and photos for us. So it’s a collaboration.

Bradley Sutton:

Now here, I just happen to see this 8,000 views. Like is this a, a, a video that you boosted somehow, or just randomly? It went kind of maybe mini viral or something? This particular one right here, 8,000 views. That’s pretty good for this. Maybe that’s why I don’t, this is one of the top sellers.

Eugene:

I know. I didn’t think it was that one, but we had an influencer that blew, blew a couple up and their, their audience just went crazy and they stocked us out. We had to cancel orders and everything like that, so that was a mess. But, but yeah, a couple videos went viral from the, from the creators, which is kinda like, that’s for us, that’s one that was one of the secrets. We, we don’t need to create everything on our own, and we don’t have the expertise or the skillset to necessarily create every single one on our own. So we might as well leverage that, give up some of the commission and utilize their, their following their audience to make our stuff go viral. And then like I said, the inventory is, I don’t know how to solve that fully yet. Maybe some other gurus out there know how to, but without spending both loads of money on over ordering inventory, I we’re trying to figure that out. So that keeps me up at night.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Interesting. Interesting. So like, what, what kind of numbers are you doing overall? Like monthly or weekly on TikTok?

Eugene:

End of June is when we started on getting onto the TikTok shop. And then I think July was our first month of full month of sales. I think it equated to probably like like 300 some more to think, which is not for us, that’s not a lot. But from a new platform like that, we were excited and we, again, we love creating nothing from something. And that was one of the things. And, and yeah, so we want to keep it, keep it going. We wanna invest harder into it. And that was I don’t wanna say our person didn’t try, but that was like, that was like such early stage and we’re able to get traction like that.

Bradley Sutton:

Just imagine in the beginning, you actually don’t even get big commissions right? From TikTok. Don’t they give it to you free commission or something like that? Do you know?

Eugene:

I know there’s a lot of perks that TikTok gave to onboard you. And, and they’ll, they’ll reimburse you on shipping. They’ll give sellers like a 30% off coupon that we don’t take to hit on they TikTok takes to hit on it. So there’s a lot of those special deals behind the scenes.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Well, this is cool, guys. You know, like, like some, like he just said they just got on there here a couple months ago and are already doing like over 10 orders a day. Less fees than Amazon. But we talked about this on the weekly buzz recently, guys that TikTok is trying to move to send everybody instead of allowing potentially this, this is just a rumor for, for right now, but you know, TikTok, people have been saying that TikTok is gonna like, stop allowing influencers maybe to send links to Amazon. They want people just buying on the TikTok platform. So if you haven’t got set up with TikTok shop, this might be something to look into and then get, get to some kind of cadence here. Like obviously Eugene’s team here is, is posting on a regular basis, and we saw just one random video got six, I see one with 6,000 views here.

Bradley Sutton:

Here’s another one with, with 8,000. So it can sometimes, you know people pick up on this and, and they can definitely boost your, your sales and for at least the, the time being, even if TikTok shop is out of stock, like he said, what people are gonna do is they’re gonna go look for his website or maybe go look for his Amazon store and find their product. So, so there’s residual benefits, not just the, the traffic that TikTok shop brings, but it’s also gonna boost your dot com sales and your, your Amazon sales. Pretty cool. One thing you mentioned before was that you having your own warehouse and, and having a big business, you, you’ve got your own internal systems in place, but you were making like, some big systems change over something at your company.

Eugene:

Yeah, I mean, long story short is we, we had to, we had some personnel changes more from the, like the developer side, which is like we’ve had our internal like systems that run our warehouse management systems, our our data harvesting, our like just customized data that we pull down from Amazon API and, and manipulate into usable chunks that, that help us internally as, as a team. So I’ve kind of, in a way lost a big chunk of that as far as like being, have that flexibility to be able to kind of create whatever you want on the fly. I still have it, but it’s not as workable and or, or more so the employee is not as, as available. So it’s one of those things that I hadn’t planned for very well over the course of, of building the businesses is just kind of not rely on, on that system so much.

Eugene:

And we’ve been trying to break away slowly, but I think it’s one of those things you get lost in the comfort, and, and that’s a major mistake. And that’s definitely one of the teaching tools that, that I would tell anybody is, is like yeah, don’t, don’t, don’t pigeon your hole yourself in and get locked into a situation like that. Really it’s like, it, there’s other, there’s enough services right now compared to when we started that deal with forecasting inventory data management, data harvesting that can that maybe the basic Amazon report is not enough for people. Like, I know it’s not enough for us. It’s too basic and it’s it takes too time consuming to drill down to what we really need it for. So we need to have scripts that run behind the scenes that pull down big data sets to formulate into this grouping or these triggers for us for the different departments that focus on the specialties to make them, Hey, I know this happened, so I gotta look at this and do this, right?

Eugene:

Without that, it can get messy and you’re gonna miss a lot of things. Yeah. So, so we’re in the process of trying to find how to blend these worlds together now where, alright, we can’t go fully customized. We can do a little customization, but who are we gonna partner with? Who are we going to, I guess, park our business with to be able to kind of fill a lot of those gaps? And then the ones that we can’t fill we’ll need to figure out how to restructure that process internally and, and find out how we make do without, without having that. So, so it’s a little, little bit of a turmoil for that. It just definitely, you can still get it done raw with like raw data and, and spreadsheets, but at, at this stage maybe if you have like selling fry products, you can do that, but our clothing is, we have so many skews, so many new, new styles that come in, new PCs because of clothing, t’s almost impossible to manage. So so we need systems and efficient data systems to be able to run the business properly. So yeah,

Bradley Sutton:

That’s one of the reasons why I was like, man, apparel is like crazy. It’s like one, you have one item, but it could have 25 variations. If it has like five colors and five sizes each, it would be a nightmare to try and manage. Alright, well, just like with your first episode we always close these with asking for your TST your 30-second or 60-second tip. What kind of strategy do you have for our listeners today?

Eugene:

You get the right people in the right seats and you get the hell out of their way. I think as simple as that, we used to micromanage, we used to try to lay this corporate structure down and, and that was just suffocating and it just didn’t work, right? Like, like we’re, we thought we were from running from our business classes. Oh, this is how you run a business. No. You can do it that way, but, but employee satisfaction, I think it can be really bad. So we, we really just kind of give them the tools that they need, give the training that they need. Some, sometimes there’s not a lot of training that we have to pay for training to get them to the, to that level to build those core competencies. And then from there, just get outta their way.

Eugene:

They’ll need you, they’ll, they’ll reach out to you when they need you. Because if you step in, like right now, if I step into every decision, like, oh, I don’t like that color, I don’t like that pattern, I don’t like that dress. Well, they did the data. They have multiple people that did the research data behind the scenes already to validate that, hey, we make decisions based on data. That was a data driven decision. It wasn’t like, oh, I like that purple color, it looks cool, right? That that doesn’t go anywhere. Right? So, so I try not to step in anything now, I do step in for any legal copyright things. I mean, that’s where my eye is trained. Like, hey, I think we’re violating that looks too close to that type of situation. Let’s stay away from that.

Eugene:

Like, that’s where I step in. But other than that, they gotta have that greater freedom. And, and of course there’s gonna be certain levels of spend where, where I, I do need to step in, but like, other than that, like, it’s not, let, let them roam free, but, but you gotta let them run and exercise their creative freedom. If they’re not very creative people and there’s certain ticks that, that that drive them, I mean, you focus on that, allow them to do those things, and it’s definitely a form of respect at that point. Right? Of course. You gotta develop that trust. It’s not like day one you hire someone in their seat and, oh, do whatever you want, right? It’s not like that. It’s over time you do that. But that’s kinda like the biggest things I’ve learned is just get out of their way because you’re gonna slow them down if you try to baby them or micromanage them too much. I think it’s pretty simple.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Alright, Eugene, thanks for coming on here. Again, we really appreciate the knowledge and a little bit different. I wanted to do a little bit different podcast today with a little bit different vibe. And so you bring a unique viewpoint to things. If you guys want to know more about what, what Eugene and I are into all these baseball card stuff, you can check what’s your Instagram for the the baseball card stuff?

Eugene:

it’s @eugerips like my first name, @eugerips

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, so take a look maybe we’ll, we’ll add some more Amazon sellers to this sports card phenomenon. So Eugene, look forward to seeing you maybe at one of these conferences coming up and wish you the best of success.

Eugene:

Likewise. Thank you Bradley.