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Welcome to TikTok Shop Insiders podcast, your source for actionable news, trends and strategies. If you want to build a thriving brand or Creator presence on TikTok shop, this is your essential listen. Let's get started. All right. Hey everyone. Welcome to TikTok Shop Insiders podcast, your source for the latest news and strategies on TikTok shop. I am your host, Ivan. Welcome back, y' all. I want to start off this episode by telling you guys, the listeners. Thank you. You can consume a lot of other content out there and you chose this one to listen. So, yeah, the experience has been great. As some of you may know, it's my first podcast and nothing but great things about it. My experience of sharing my thoughts and it's kind of what I dreamed it would be, but more right. I have a passion about TikTok Shop, new emerging e commerce platforms, you know, because this podcast I'm able to have conversations with people that I obviously wouldn't have before and that's giving me information to share with you guys, which is, you know, kind of making me a thought leader in the space and starting more conversations. So it's kind of like a cool little circle of like information on TikTok shop and relationships and connections and all that. So it's. Yeah, I appreciate you guys listening. It's been really, really cool so far and I plan to have so many more continue this because it's been so great. But on that note, if you could leave a review, that'd be awesome. I kind of put a lot of hard work, my team editing and thinking of ideas and filtering out all the ideas and yeah, I mean, take a pause and leave a review. That'd be amazing just to kind of show that you guys are listening and what I'm saying kind of matters and works. So thank you. Yeah. So latest and greatest with me is last time I came back from Hawaii, which was cool. And then actually in a couple days it's my birthday, so celebrating my birthday and gonna be celebrating with a golf trip. My very first golf trip with a couple of my guy friends. So like most all seems like all middle aged parents, dads nowadays, like they're all taking up golf. So yeah, that's kind of my, my advice at the moment of, of of, you know, playing golf. And this is my first trip. I think it's actually my first trip away from my family alone, which is kind of cool or you know, new experience. So my little ones were telling me they're gonna miss me, which is kind of cute. And I was like, oh, I'll just be back. And only it's only one night or so. You know, I want to make it as quick as possible. But yeah, golf trip on the, on the horizon and that'll be fun. But yeah, onto the episode. You know, we always like to start with some news, right? I wanted to share this is maybe always present but on time delivery rate OTDR is now enforced, right? And so I think it kind of always was enforced. But starting May 5, sellers with a score of 80% or below will face penalties affecting our account health. Right? And so, you know, this is the percentage of orders delivered on, on time, weekly. So in summary, you just want to make sure your orders are delivered. We had an incident with a client where, you know, their orders weren't being delivered. We would let them know, like, hey, these orders need to be shipped out or else we're going to get dinged, right? And they ended up not shipping it. And then lo and behold, their account gets kind of paused, right? And the score, you know, dips below, I think, 3.5. And the result of that, you're not able to message affiliates, right? So that kind of screeching halt to all of our, you know, know, our, our progress, we're gaining really good traction, really, you know, I think the, the trend was upwards, right? And then this happens and it kind of has to reset everything. So definitely keep, you know, TikTok doesn't play around with your kind of health score, your, your cell health score. So keep that in mind. An update on the creator side is that now they can see a simplified shop score, right? So these creators, these affiliates, you know, in evaluating what products to use or to, to make videos from and choose, they see, you know, positive reviews and highly recommended kind of notes from TikTok, right? So they're browsing on a product or on TikTok shop, they see your product, they click on it. Well, now TikTok has like little, I guess, banners to show you, you know, is this a good product to review based on your shop health score and kind of just general data coming from TikTok, right? So obviously you want to keep that high as possible to be most attractive to affiliates, right? And so, yeah, it's a, you know, I think it's, this is a great move. You know, you want to have the highest quality out there for, for affiliates to make products of, for affiliates to make videos of and vice versa. Now, sellers, you can see creator scores, right? And so, you know, you can see performance scores of these creators. I think just recently they rolled out with, you know, diamond, bronze level, silver level, creator scores. Right. And so it's really just making the, you know, classification of which creators to go with more clear. Right. That's always been kind of the background, you kind of know, with GNV and you look at their profile, but now it's kind of on the forefront. Right. So it's all an effort to kind of higher quality brands, higher quality creators, right. So I think it's great. Quick update also is the shop, so not your product page, but when you click your brand it goes to a shop that has had some kind of updates and refreshes, right? So you can, you can always do this but like I think better banners, you can use brand colors and you know, have featured products. So if you haven't already, go ahead and take a look at the back end and seller center of your shop and make sure you kind of make it the way you want. And I have a data point here of shops using this feature averaging 2 times higher conversion rate, 3.78 versus 1.73 conversion rate. So I mean I think that comes from TikTok. So definitely want to take a look at that, you know, conversion rate. That's crazy data. Up next is CRM updates for smarter customer retention. And so in the CRM customer retention tool and the back of seller center, you now can, it's a lot more smarter, right? You can what do you call segment and target messages according to that segment. Right. So an example is create a 30 day lapse buyer segment and send a personalized we miss you coupon. Right. And so the, you know, definitely, you know, you already did the hard work of getting them in the system. You know, let's go ahead and finish it off with a CRM and, and reaching out to back to them and giving them a deal or just putting them front of mind or putting your brand front of mind to the shopper. But yeah, that concludes it for the news portion. Now to the main part of the podcast. I wanted to talk about reviews. Reviews, Reviews, reviews. I think that's, reviews are the number one kind of factor when looking at a product on TikTok shop as well as Amazon. Right. And so I'm going to go through three things about reviews, you know, why they matter. Number two is how to get the important initial reviews, right? How to go from zero to a handful of reviews. And then number three, it's like how to, once you have those reviews, how do you get more, right. And how do you handle getting more or more importantly for Me is how do you mitigate those one star reviews, right? And so yeah, I've, as you guys know, Amazon days. I have like 10 years of Amazon experience. That's where I launched my own private label brand. And in that time, reviews were everything. They were literally, literally everything. You know, launching a brand on Amazon, back In the day, 10 years ago, we would have review groups, right? And these were, you know, kind of allowed at the time, not allowed anymore. But you know, launching a new product, there's already a bunch of products on there with reviews. How are you going to stick out? How is someone going to buy yours without any reviews, right? And so back then we would have review groups where we would kind of reach out to these hundreds of people. They just wanted free product and so we'd send them free product in exchange for a five star review. That was kind of like how it went when it first started on Amazon. Obviously not the way you do it now, but yeah, so we would kind of send out those products, get those initial reviews and kind of similarly those sales would also spike in Amazon's algorithm, right? And so they see a whole bunch of sales, whole bunch of reviews, they got to rank you more, right? And so that's how you rank fast and kind of get those initial sales on Amazon, right? And then, yeah, that it was super important for reviews, I think also just as important on TikTok shop, right? And I think more so because not only are you having reviews for the customer, right? Should I buy this product for myself, but also for the affiliates, they definitely take it, take a look at the reviews and say like, okay, well this, I've heard this before. They say, oh, this product doesn't have any reviews so I'm not gonna, you know, promote it. Or this has, you know, two star reviews. Of course I'm not gonna promote it, right? So yeah, I think reviews are super important. You know, it's a. When I evaluate brands and products for clients and reviews are the first thing I look at. How does this kind of pan out on, how will this product pan out on TikTok shop? So yeah, you know, back in the day on my Amazon business, I remember this one time, right, I launched a product, I believe it was a back cushion. And you launch a product, you have zero reviews, you kind of do the kind of the review groups, you get like five reviews, you know, golden, you know, five reviews, five star. Okay. I'm starting to get some momentum getting a sale or two here and there and then a one star review comes, like, oh man, it Kind of turns that five star, five reviewed to like a four star, six reviews product. And as you know, like that's gonna have its, you know, negative effects on your product, right? And so, so important to have those five star reviews. And that one star review came along and I was like, well this is gonna be a slow go if I'm gonna try to compete with a four star product. Right. And so what I did was deleted that listing, created a new listing, same product, and restarted the review process. Right. And so that product did well, you know, it climbed the ranks and kind of did its thing. Right. But if I would have stayed the course of that four star product, it would have been a harder road, right? Same product, same same process. But that one star rogue review kind of like took its course. And I believe it was competitors, right? And it was, I don't know, there was, there's kind of no reason to, to say that they just said they didn't like it. But yeah, I mean just, I just want to echo like how much, how important, you know, positive and negative reviews are, right. So yeah, I think another thing is like social proof. It can give your product some social proof, right. When you're evaluating different products, obviously the most reviewed, highly reviewed is a lot better than you know, kind of what's not. Like I mentioned before, like no reviews is kind of like a deal breaker, right? If an affiliate sees a product with no reviews, it's quick to say no, right? Because they don't know what it's like. So I always like to, to say like start with a couple, you know, I'll go over in a little bit about how to get those first initial ones. But you know, again, you wanna, you don't Wanna start a TikTok shop journey with zero reviews, right? You want to have some reviews on there, right? And up next is, you know, kind of an, an example of, of, of this in, in, in progress. Right. So we had a client on board recently and before us they started their affiliate strategy to some success. Not a lot, right. And so they're just sending out messages and they weren't getting very many affiliates and the affiliate rate was super low. Affiliates sample rate. Well, I looked at their listing and it didn't have any reviews on it. You know, it was a high quality product. No reviews on, was high selling on Amazon reviews on there. But on TikTok it didn't happen. Right. And so when we onboarded, part of our process is how can we build up the TikTok shop listing with reviews as much as Possible. Right. And so an easy way, there's a way of porting your Amazon reviews and your.com reviews through YPO to TikTok shop, right? So it's a simple app and background. Pull it and you kind of populate the TikTok shop reviews. They're not verified, but obviously some is better than none. And if you have thousands on another channel, it's, you know, a lot better than zero. So populated that now you have affiliates looking at your product now they're more interested. So the percentage of affiliates that accepted or were interested in partnering with us increased. Now that pool of quality of affiliates, right? More affiliates, higher quality. Now we can choose higher quality affiliates to, you know, promote our product. And now, you know, we're off and running on a better note. Right. And so these are like little things you wouldn't. I mean, it's pretty obvious that reviews matter, but maybe laying it out like this like it does, like reviews have an effect on, you know, a domino effect on higher quality that's coming through. So just a kind of real world, like if you're going out there with zero reviews, definitely want to beef that up. Up next is, you know, thinking about it through the, you know, how do we get more reviews on TikTok shop? Right, we have zero at this moment and how do we get more? So there's a couple ways to do it here. It's porting over from your Shopify store. There's a handful of tools out there. Yotpo judge me that you have tools within seller center. You can connect that, connect it to your.com and it can port over the review. So that's a very easy way. If you're an established brand, definitely do that. There's a way to do it through Amazon as well. So there's a handful of tools that you can download your Amazon reviews, port them over to one of these tools and then it'll go into TikTok shop. Right? And so Amazon, I know there's a ton of reviews there, so you, you want to take advantage of those as well. And then for those that kind of don't have it for like the new brands that don't have much and I know there's a ton that are starting out, I would say friends and family, like if you have zero reviews, one is better than zero, right? And so getting, you know, your neighbor, your mom to buy and leave a review, you know, I think buying and leaving review at scale is a big, big no, no. If you do it once or twice, I think that's acceptable. Right? And you could, you know, honestly have your neighbor buy it. You could do it in a way where it's totally legit, like, hey, neighbor, could you buy my product and leave a review on TikTok Shop? And, like, what you really think? And that's better than nothing, right? And so definitely want to, you know, if you do that through your family across the country, you know, better than nothing as well. Right? So definitely start with some friends and family on how to do that. Another way is this is more gray hat. We don't do it. I've. And I mentioned this because I like to kind of talk about the gray hat strategies, but I've seen this on other channels and people that I've spoken with, but using Facebook groups as well as kind of burner accounts. I've seen someone using a burner account of buying their own product, but using these Facebook groups. I mentioned before where these groups would just want free product. And so you go in these Facebook groups, you say, hey, I have a product on TikTok shop. Buy it, leave a review, and I'll refund you the money. Definitely not something I like to do again. But, you know, just keeping you guys aware of, like, what is going on out there, I think that's, for me, the most important part to kind of know that your competition is what they could be doing. Right? And I've seen, you know, I bring this up because you might have seen this meme of, you know, I think it's abroad, but, you know, overseas, where there's, you know, a. A table full of iPhones and. And smartphones, and it's kind of just like manipulating algorithms, if you will. Right? So you would definitely. I definitely would think that someone would buy from one of those and leave a review. Right? And so, like, that's just the links that people will go. So, yeah, that's that. That's that, you know, that a way to get those first reviews, again, not. Not recommended. And then last thing I want to review here, it's like, okay, those are kind of quick hits on how to get a review. And then we also have in our agency, like, how do we handle reviews? Right? You know, we get positive reviews, we get negative reviews. How do we ask for more reviews? Right? And so I want to kind of talk through that, how we handle that. So, you know, you're running your store. You get some sales, you get some positive reviews. Our team monitors reviews daily. Are there any new reviews? If it's a great review, we'll respond with a personal thank you. On the review itself, hey, hope you like the product, et cetera, et cetera. And we also like share or pin the positive reviews in that section, right? And we also use those positive reviews in our affiliate message like, hey, check out this, this review that we got for the product. Yeah, kind of social proof that you should promote our product. Right. And yeah, so it's really just like nurturing that positive review, right. I know some people, when they see they got responded to, it's a, it's a great feeling, right? Or maybe even if someone's reading reviews and they see that the brand responded to them, they are more inclined to leave a review. So yeah, that also kind of, speaking of kind of old school Amazon days we used to have, I remember adding a thank you card to my packaging and saying like, hey, thank you for buying a product. We would appreciate a review on TikTok Shop. So yeah, that would kind of, you know, if they see that they like your product more inclined to leave a review. So having inserts in your product is something I like to, to include in packaging if you're able to do that. This is for me the most important, handling negative reviews, right? You get a negative review brings your score down. I mentioned before, it kind of really shook me, not really shook me up, but like kind of changes trajectory of a product. 1, 1 review can change the trajectory of a product, right? And so you want to, you know, number one, make sure you monitor daily, right? You want to make sure that you monitor for those 1, 2, 3, even 4 star reviews. Like what can we get a 4? How can we get a 4 star to a 5 star, right? And so this is kind of the key to this whole thing. If you're, if you're kind of listening, I want you to listen now. But there's a way of finding the order from every review that's given, right? So if you have a one star review, you can kind of click around and find the order of that and in that order and you can message that person, right? And you know, you know, ultimately at the core, you want to make them happy, right? So they left their one star review. They didn't like it. They didn't like the smell, they didn't like the feel. Well, now let's reach out to them like, hey, well, I mean, lots of other people liked it, they love it. You know, I would love to understand more why you didn't like it. You know, when we offer money back, you know, guarantee, you know, satisfaction, guarantee, we just want to make you happy. Right. And so like kill them with kindness, give them that extra special customer support, right. And understand why they didn't like it. And hopefully, you know, at the end of this you could turn around and get them to leave a five star review. I've done that as well. Right. So I've gone on communications with someone who's left the one star. You know, they didn't like the smell. They didn't know that they could return it. Funny enough. And they returned it. We give them their money back and they're all smile. And then the question is like, okay, well you're happy now. You know, we thrive on our reviews. Would you, you know, hopefully, you know, change your one star to a five star? So yeah, I think another point that I want to make here, it's like I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but like one one star review kills like eight five star reviews, right. It'll bring, you know that, that review rating from five stars all the way down to like four and a half stars. And if you have two, it'll bring it down to four stars, which is crazy, right? So two negative one star reviews can kind of bring your whole rating down and change the trajectory of your business, right? So you want to avoid 1 star reviews as much as possible, right. Kind of like outside tips I have as well is like in your reviews you want to monitor and because there are some bad actors as well, right. If you get popular, there's going to be people who leave bad reviews on your, on your product, your competitors. Right. Now I would also say like, you know, I've actually seen a brand leave a review on a competitor and say I bought competitor but I prefer this brand better. And so it's leading it to the, to, to the new brand. So it's kind of crazy, right? So that's a way of manipulating the reviews, right? So I would definitely report that as well as bad words. Like I've gotten reviews 1 star reviews taken down because it is using profanity or not the right language. Right. And so Tick Tock obviously wants to make it clean. So you know, reporting that will get your one star review you and as well as like a proactive post purchase review system. Right. So you want to send a message to every customer thanking them for their purchase and asking them how it went and like in their response of how it went, like if it went well, you know, don't hesitate to ask, oh, would you, you know, we thrive on reviews. Would you, you know, could you leave us a review or if they didn't have a, you know, great experience, then how can you make them have five star experience? Well, oh man, I'll give you your money back or maybe I'll give you this replacement for free. Right. And so I really just want to again, avoid those one star reviews as much as possible. And yeah, I think, you know, for me, you know, I'll throw in a bonus tip here. It's like, how many reviews does it take to launch on TikTok shop? For me, the mad, you know, the magic number is 10. Right. That double digit review count is kind of where the, the line is marked. Right. You know, 0 to 1 is a huge one, but also like single digits to double digits is a huge one. Right. It's kind of like more than just, you know, you know, single digits. It's visibly something different. Right. And I know me as a shopper, I definitely look at that, you know, kind of there's something psychologically that changes. Right. So, yeah, that kind of concludes here today as far as tick tock shop and reviews and why they matter and how to kind of get that initial boost and how to treat, you know, your positive reviews and negative reviews, how to get more. So, yeah, again, you know, why does reviews matter? You know, how to get those important initial reviews and then how to handle those positive and negative reviews once they start coming in. So, yeah, that concludes it for today's episode. Again, thank you for listening. It's been, you know, a wild ride and pretty fun and I enjoy this TikTok shop space. So I appreciate you guys listening. It's great to see the numbers kind of keep on piling up and, and rising as time goes on. Yeah, if you like what you hear, go ahead and leave me a review. Speaking of reviews, leave me a review on, you know, Spotify or itunes, whatever you're listening. And yeah, I will catch you next time. See you guys.