BREAKING: Instagram Shopping Is Here — Here's What DTC Brands Should Do transcript

Breaking news. And I've got exactly the person to help us figure out what happened. Instagram and Facebook are are have created their answer to TikTok Shop. It's going live affiliate shopping in platform uh on Facebook, on Instagram. I'm not even sure I just said that right because this is not the world that I know the most deeply. So, I found the person who does knows world really deeply. The person who actually overhauled his entire agency to focus on social commerce, this kind of stuff.

And that is my good friend Jordan West who is here with us to talk about what you need to know about this major, potentially really huge change that's going to affect a lot of D2C businesses in really big ways. Let's get into it with Jordan West from Social Commerce. Let's do it right now. Social Commerce Club. I said Social Commerce in the intro and I meant to say and I was like, I think there's a club in there. I just kind of forgot cuz I just think of you as a Social Commerce guy and so your your name is just Social Commerce in my mind, Jordan.

Which is incredible. It's the Kleenex. Like we've done it we've done the Kleenex thing for this world of Social Commerce, which is incredible. Like thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. Uh okay, tell people what happened. First of all, I I literally was looking at this going like like like the moment I saw this news, I was like, got to get Jordan back on the pod. Got to know what happened. I promise he knows about it. So, I know so little except for basically what I've seen you tweet.

Um and uh and and that's it. So, what happened? What what is happening and when is it happening? Give people the details. So, let me give a bit of background here. So, Meta has been trying to get into this game for a while, right? They did Meta Shops. It was kind of during COVID. They're like, yeah, this is going to be the next big thing. When TikTok Shop first came around, I just assumed that it was the same sort of flop as what Meta had done where it's like, yeah, we're just going to check out on social and we're going to call that social commerce.

Well, TikTok Shop came around and introduced a win-win closed ecosystem platform where affiliates are able to get paid right within the platform itself and the checkout happens within the platform. Incredible, right? Incredible, changed a lot of things. You guys can go back. I've talked about it twice with Andrew. And now we and we were wondering, when is this going to happen? When is Meta going to look and be like, uh I think we need to do something about it.

Well, the answer was this Tuesday. Right? This last Tuesday is when they did it. And this is this is weird because I don't think that they actually thought through the entire thing. I think that this is what was incredibly reactive. I really do believe it was a code red um that they called because they saw what was happening. I do have a bit of a different take, I think, on this, Andrew, of like why Meta thought it was such a big deal.

Do you do you want to hear the the hot take that I have on this? I I do, but I'm going to make the people wait. I'm going to make you wait for the >> Oh, yeah, of course, of course. I'll take it at the end. Okay, no, no, not all the way at the end. So, but here's the always here's what I always perceived as the problem with Meta doing this, which is their ad business. Essentially, that like the the Meta ad business is so good and the TikTok ad business has historically Well, I mean, I don't I don't know what like the GMV of it, but like has sucked compared to Meta.

I mean, as like as a media buyer, it's just like I know I know so few people. I Actually, let me amend that statement. I know the zero people who are like really spending meaningfully at a high ROAS on TikTok unless that is somehow connected shop strategy. So, then I know people who are using the the the money well. But I don't know anybody who's like doing it like they do Meta. So, it has always seemed to me that the big barrier to Meta doing this same thing was that a disruption to their core ad business didn't make any sense for them because it is too good of a business as as it was.

On the other hand, it's very clear that a lot of people are buying stuff on social via things like TikTok the way that they are doing that. And so, it's like a weird catch-22 for them. Do you think that's an accurate I I maybe this even gets towards your hot take, I don't know. Do you think that's an accurate uh explanation of like the predilection they're in there? Yes, it is the it is the exact same thing that is happening to Google or has happened to Google when they decided to put AI overviews in search.

Yeah, right, right, right. >> It just it cannibalizes what they're doing right now. But that's the that's the thing is like, well, okay, so if they believe So, this this signal to me was like, oh, so Meta now actually understands that social commerce is the new way that people are going to sell things. So, what does that do to their ad business? To be honest, I don't think it's going to disrupt it much at all. I think that it's going to continue on.

Now, the wild thing that they did with this, and this is not part of my hot take, guys. I'll tell you when I'm going to my hot take. >> [laughter] >> But mhm part of part of what they did here is that the the affiliate codes that you can use. So, I'll tell you about the mechanics of it. First of all, people can put creators can put up to 30 products per reel, which is just like wild. >> That's a lot of products, yeah.

I I'm trying to figure out a use case. Like like what? You want to like look and see every single thing in my house and then put the affiliate code in for that. So, Yeah. It's like it's like can an individual creator be a like a retailer, basically, right? Like your house becomes a retail environment. Aha. Which is kind of fun, you know? Yeah, that I agree. As like as I'm saying that, I'm like, that's kind of interesting.

Yeah. As somebody as somebody who somebody who doesn't use social media like that, but yeah, okay, keep going. Why Meta Ray-Bans are a phenomenal product as well. Like I love my Meta Ray-Bans so much because you can live stream with them. Like imagine now being a creator live streaming straight onto Instagram yeah, while selling product. Like you could be in a store and being like, well, I've got an affiliate code here.

I might as well just like talk about this product. So, anyway, the thing that they did though was they opened up the ability for people to transact on both Amazon and Shopify, not on their platform using affiliate codes through Meta's Commerce Manager. So, there's only there's only three ways that you can do it right now. You can do it through Meta's Commerce Manager, which each one of these has to go through anyway, through Shopify Collabs, which is uh that used to be Dovetail years ago.

Um it's now Shopify's one affiliate uh platform. Pretty basic. Honestly, it gets the job done in my mind. It's it's pretty good. And the third is Impact. So, Impact is the one that you'd be able to use to track affiliate traffic from Reels over into Amazon, which is really cool. That's interesting. >> That is where That's I mean, that's different than TikTok, right? Like you can you do that on TikTok? No. No, you cannot.

No, you cannot, but >> [gasps] >> uh potentially coming at some point, right? Like obviously, there's there's only so much I can say that I'm allowed to say for for different things. And and at some point it will come. There's also the crazy Halo, right? Of TikTok shop over. Um my Halo tool is ready, by the way. I still don't actually know if I'm going to launch it to the to the general public. What is it? Mhm so, it is it is take So, I bought a multi-touch attribution tool.

I number one, I I'm sure you and I disagree on this, Andrew, because I don't agree with a lot of people. I don't believe in multi-touch attribution. I don't think it's a great model. I I have I have never I have never not zero of my clients and zero reporting comes through Triple Whale or North Beam. I so not not only do we not use multi-touch, we don't even use an yeah, we don't we don't use any of it at all. So, you and I are 100% on the same page here.

I have his Yeah, one I could >> ever made I I have never made a good decision using a multi-touch attribution tool? Never. I've never I've never seen the need for one. I've never understood why people use them. I Taylor Holiday was all over this from day one, which was like like, wait, why would I need that? I don't understand. Meta as a attribution is basically accurate when tied to a click, basically. It's not it's not perfect, but it's like very close.

And then like there's this idea that you're going to try to change the optimization relative to what the machine wants to optimize for. It doesn't And then like click attribution makes no sense for branded search or something like that. Anyway, like it's it's just yeah, it's just a mess. Totally. If So, so we had that over there and then we have big MMMs on this side that are really expensive and really clunky and slow.

And I mean, there's some good ones. There's Precedent, right? Which is pretty fast, super expensive. Yeah. Um Awesome. Love those guys. Halo sits in the middle of that and helps you make these decisions based on Now, this is for omni-channel brands, right? Brands that are sitting that that you want to sit back. Incredible. And I can talk about these guys. Portland Leather Goods, they're working with us right now on TikTok Shop.

And Curtis came to me, founder over there, and he's like, Jordan, we're doing an extra $100,000 a day on Shopify and we haven't done anything other than TikTok Shop. More revenue than they were doing on TikTok Shop. Yeah, yeah, right. And it's over there. And so, we have the Halo tool. And the crazy thing is we can actually see this data. And I was actually just walking my team through it to to be like, here's how we cuz our our team is like 75 now.

I'm like, it's getting too big. And and I'm trying to walk them through I'm like, this is how we need to think about talking to our clients about this, right? Is there is actually this mass Halo onto Shopify. Onto Shopify. That's the wild thing. Everyone's talking about Amazon. But it's it's massively onto Shopify. The Halo is actually about in this case about a six-day lag in between TikTok Shop video views. Uh old school advertising, right?

What did we always measure? It's just CPMs. Like it's just views. Now, quality of view matters, right? Over onto over onto other channels. And now we can see it and we can like definitively be like oh my gosh, we need to pour money in here even if we're losing money. I'm not saying people always are losing money on TikTok shop, but even if you were, it would be well worth your while to do as your advertising channel.

Even if you're just breaking even, it's your advertising channel to the masses. Not just my business, but actually my life has been changed, transformed by interacting with incredible talent from the Philippines, uh which is now the vast majority of the people in my business at AF Growth. I just couldn't be a bigger fan of the opportunity of creating a great business with great talent that is accessible to me across the world in the Philippines because of my friends at More Staffing and their sister companies.

More Staffing, very simply, connects you to incredible talent in the Philippines. Think beyond the $5 an hour virtual assistant. Think instead about getting really good people with deep experience who uh have deep resumes, who are ready to contribute to your business and grow in your business. I literally just promoted somebody I hired from More Staffing like a couple weeks ago, just promoted him. I have a bunch more promotions in front of him still, very likely to have happen.

Uh he's just an awesome and really critical member of our team, hired through More Staffing from the Philippines, came in at an assistant level, and he's just going to keep getting promoted because he's awesome. And and that's that's there's a really simple reason for this, which is that the Philippines is a country of you know, somewhere around 100 million people, almost 100 million people. There's a lot of really talented people there, but your dollars go a lot farther to hire at the top of that market than they would in the US market.

And that means that you attract the best talent in a very large talent pool into your business. And that's what More Staffing connects you to, and they make the whole process super easy. They can help you with every single part of it. They do a bunch of pre-screening interviews. They have a real pipeline developed. They get you the right person for the right job. They help you form that job description and go make that search way easier.

I saved a ton of time in the process of getting my most recent hire, which just who started just a couple days ago in the company. I saved a ton of time by working with More Staffing to connect me to that talent. We ended up with only having to interview two people. We loved both of them, actually. We would have probably hired both. We ended up having to only pick one, but we loved both. And so much so that I actually recommended the backup candidate to a friend of mine.

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Go check out for yourself morestaffing.co/af, morestaffing.co/af. Tell them I sent you. I think that makes sense. So, okay, so wait. Does this get you to your hot take? Well, does this get you to your hot take? I I could definitely go into my hot take right now of why Meta is calling a code red on this. Okay, go. Do it. Yeah, so I actually truly believe that the biggest issue that Meta is facing right now is creator content, right?

What do they sell at the end of the day? What at the end of the day what they are selling they is content on their platform. Well, who is incentivized right now, which which platform is incentivized to make more content? Right? That's that's why TikTok shop is actually amazing. It's this incredible incestuous win-win for TikTok because more people are making money making content, which is the product that they're selling anyways, is content.

People are not doing that at the same level that they were on Instagram Reels. And no one is really making money over there, and brands are now investing mass amounts of money in the creators on TikTok because they're all incentivized to do it. And so so Instagram's like, oh my gosh, a year ago they were paying like I I think it was like $300,000 for some of the top creators to stop posting on TikTok and just come post on Reels.

Crazy. >> $300,000. Like it is wild. Yeah, crazy. So, you think basically what's happening is their their content was drying up and they just needed a way to get people to get posting again. Exactly. They need more supply, and what they're realizing is that they're okay to cannibalize some of their business and some of the newsfeed on Instagram specifically first. >> traits they're going to test it on Instagram first because they they this is this is what I think is going through their heads right now.

They're going to try it in this easier way using affiliate codes, and nobody knows by the way. Like I talked to the guys at Social Snowball yesterday. And I'm like, do your affiliate codes work on there? They're like, we don't know. They don't know, so Is it is it live now? Like are people posting and making money and sell selling stuff on these shops like right now? >> live now. All of the payments happen third party.

Okay. >> Right? on the affiliate platforms. It's just that now they can actually post these on Reels. That's the difference. It's You know what's so funny about this is the way that like for a while organic social was pay for post, and then pay for post died, and now it's like it now it's like back to a very like get somebody to post and that's how you make money. Now, you don't you pay for post in a different way than you used to, but uh but it's it's so fascinating how much it just like got got back to that world after that was sort of like the the thing that died out, you know.

Totally. Yeah. Uh is um is is Okay, so let's actually break down more of what it is. So So, right now, if I'm a creator on Instagram, is there like a follower count gate that I have to have to get access to affiliate 1,000 is the follower gate. >> So, I need 1,000 followers, then I can start posting. I can tag products, and I'm going to send somebody you just mentioned one of three places, right, which is basically different places to capture value.

One of them was like a Shopify affiliate place to capture money. One of them was an Amazon affiliate way to capture money. And the third one was what? Commerce Manager, but as far as I know, they can actually only check out through the affiliate links either using Amazon or Shopify. Okay. Okay. >> So, Meta's Commerce Man- Meta's Commerce has nothing to do with it as far as we know. >> Well, cuz Meta even shut it down.

I think the way Shops ended up working is that they eventually stopped having native checkout in Meta. That's right. All the checkout happens on Shopify anyway. >> Shop, yeah. Right. So, even if you're using even if you're using Shopify. Yeah, I mean I sort of think I sort of think what happened there is that people just I Yeah, well it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what I think happened there. But uh Anyway, the point is so customers can go do those things.

That is interesting you can get back to Amazon that way. Um uh and then is there any limitation to which brands can participate at this point? Not that we know. Again, we I know as much as as much as the next guy. I don't >> but you know you know more cuz I'm sure that just given your line of work you have to have read all the stuff and looked into all of it, right? And called every person I know and been like, do you know?

Do you know? Yeah, yeah. I mean so Well, let let's ask let's ask this. Uh did have you done have you created any guidance for Social Commerce Club clients uh that would apply here? That like you know, are are you telling people right now like talk to your affiliates and go make it happen, you know? Like I mean what what are we what are we doing here? Yeah, so that's that's a really great question. So, my guidance I actually just made like a 15-minute video for our clients the other day um with my CEO Parker.

We told our clients we said, "Hey, for right now, we don't know what this is going to do. The best course of action is to continue on TikTok shop, to continue to build a creator community, and build the muscles of the things that we've been talking about the whole time because again, we didn't call it TikTok shop club. I called it Social Commerce Club because I really do believe that it's going to be platform agnostic, the way that it's going to be.

I still think that TikTok's algo and the internal workings of TikTok shop are way more powerful than this. If you are a brand that has not yet cra- cracked TikTok shop, doesn't mean you're just going to suddenly be able to crack Instagram shopping or whatever we're calling this thing. Like it's it's a muscle that you have to build to understand how to do. Right? Like it's it's not that easy. That's true, but what I also wonder about is for brands that are already spending material money on Meta, this feels like the advantage that Meta has here is that in some way there has to be internal ability to track conversions and to and to to sort of integrate data in a way that makes a little more sense because like the great advantage of Meta, right, is just like many years of conversions conversion data with their pixel across every website on the internet for 20 years or whatever, just like just dialing in a a an ad delivery system that just works.

It just works better than everybody else. The reason that you can't buy conversion optimized TikTok ads at real scale relative to what you can from Meta is not is is not because there aren't enough users on TikTok. There user There's plenty of users on TikTok, right? They There are a lot of people spending a lot of time there. It's because the conversion optimization machine doesn't work as well, basically. That's my That's what I'm saying that with a lot of confidence.

That's my feel for what is happening there. Uh it may also be cuz there's other factors you may have perspective on that, and I'll let you speak to that in a second. But the point is the thing that's interesting to me is what I wonder about is as Meta has moved people towards this like creator marketplace kind of thing where you're going to find creators to work with for your ads, and now they're integrating a an an actual native shopping experience, I wonder how all of that stuff will come together from a data perspective.

So, even something you just mentioned which is like halo effect, like what's going to happen when you have a when you have a partnership ad with a creator, and maybe they also tag your product in the partnership ad, and you know what I mean? Like and there's like multiple places to check out now. Like there's a lot there's a lot of interesting ways to see how those things will kind of keep coming together and sort of uh allow a combination of organic lift plus paid lift boost those posts, which is already what people are doing on TikTok, right?

Like spending a bunch of money >> It's just waitlisting at scale. Yeah. Right. Right. So, yeah, I mean I I know. You can respond to anything I just said, but I'm curious how you I just don't know the TikTok game very well. I just see a few people doing it well, but I don't know the mechanics of it. You do. You know it inside and out. You know it better than anybody I know. So, what but what like what is your perspective on sort of how the whole ecosystem goes going forward or or any really anything I just said if you want to speak to.

So, what I'm concerned with with brands is that they're going to I think a lot of brands that grew up in Facebook ad world, right? For us, like I had my first brand was at at uh 20 15 20 Actually, I had a I had a hoverboard uh drop shipping brand in like 2013, so. How did it go? I honestly I made really good money. Uh it's just that one of them did uh have some issues and um and did like smoke. Um and I was like, I don't want to drop ship products anymore.

I'm not into this. So. That's such a drop shipping story, dude. And I was like, I don't want to do this. And then that's when we started our baby clothing company right at the same time. And I'm like, oh, I can scratch my itch of Facebook ads during this time. So. That's amazing. The problem is so many people have been grown up on Facebook ads, which is like Okay, compared to lately to TikTok shop, I'm just going to say, it's just a little bit easier.

Like the amount of people that we have to have to do this stuff is just wild, right? Um it is not an easy lift. Like I I the amount of brands that come in and talk to me like they're like $100 million phone case brand today. So, should we do it? I'm like, yes, but only if you have mass amounts of resources or hire us. Like it's a huge amount of resources to do it. Um is it worth it? Yes, like 100% Go talk to Curtis and McCoy at at Portland Leather Goods.

Yes, it is worth it. Right? Um but the problem is I think that if brands didn't understand what the brands that are going to win on on this new version of Instagram shopping because what's happening is ads are getting better, right? And and the people are buying based on So, like again, you can hear all of this stuff cuz Curtis talks about it constantly. Their top ad went to what is now their 15th top ad because all of our TikTok shop content is now in their Meta account and is the is their top 15 best ads.

So, what I'm saying is that the the brands that don't understand the muscles and just want a new version of Facebook ads it's it's that's not what it is. Social commerce is different than that. So, you need to understand what it's actually going to take to get your product out there into the hands of a lot of uh a lot of creators and then work with the right creators. And that cuz it's not just like an ad game. Like you're not just boosting these posts.

It's so much more than that. But I think that Meta like I think you're totally right. I think they're set up to dominate. Like absolutely dominate. And we'll be in on the early days just so you guys know. Like I'm going to be in like very very early year. One of the things I love about the sponsors that I work with is that they are not the kind of sponsors that are going to promise you magic. I have never been handed an ad read that says, do this one thing with my piece of software and you're going to see your CAC go down by 40% or whatever it is.

And Intellijemz is no different than that. As you feel in this episode with Jordan, real value creation in your business takes time and effort and it takes knowing your numbers and takes good data. And Intellijemz is one of those products in a great brand software stack that [music] is part of how you accomplish that. That's because Intellijemz is CRO way beyond the basics. Uh it's built to tie in to your [music] product data to your COGS data on Shopify and in into your Shopify store to make it possible for you to deploy really high quality testing on offers, prices, you know, design.

You can do full Shopify theme designs, your checkout, your [music] shipping thresholds, how much you're charging for shipping. All these things that are big parts of how customers interact with your brand. Intellijemz allows you to test all of that. And then because it ties into your Shopify COGS data, it reads out the performance of your test at the level of the actual profit [music] your tests are driving. If you heard my episode with Joe Marconi, CEO of of Intellijemz a few weeks ago, you'll hear they have a real mind for how to deploy the right mix of tests between fast and quick learning with what kind of test you should be doing that are larger, longer efforts measured very carefully.

They know how to think about this stuff. They have been supporting by operators in space for a while and that's what they care about the most. In fact, what they tell me all the time with my ad reads is, >> [music] >> we are in the business of helping great operators who are really serious about operational excellence apply that to their pricing and to their design and to their CRO efforts. And everything about their products reflects that.

We're just a huge fan. Basically, all my clients are using it. I I think almost all of them. I had another meeting call with my CEO today about how we hope to get all of our clients literally using it and and building that into our system all the time cuz it's just a really important part of how great brands grow and grow profitably and do all those things. Go check it out for yourself. Intellijemz.io. If you're serious about making your website experience better for your customers and more valuable for your business, you should be using Intellijemz as part of it.

Intellijemz.io. Use the code Ferris20. F A R I S 20. You get 20% off your first 3 months. Uh so, you can test it for a little cheaper, a little easier than you would before. Ferris20, 20% off your first 3 months Intellijemz. The link's in the show notes. Well, let let's do this right now, by the way, Jordan. People are listening to that and saying, okay, I want to get in on this. Uh let's just Let's just drop the plug-in right here.

Who Who should be reaching out to you at Social Commerce Club? What kind of brands should be reaching out to uh if they want your help cuz it's time. >> Yeah, the the brands that we work with they're generally doing somewhere above 10 to 20 million-ish on other channels. Um brands that want to and can invest in a new channel. Like these all of these channels are not dip your toe in channels. Right? They're like, hey, we're going to either cold plunge or not.

Right? Like That's kind of the you know, for for those of you out there who like a good cold plunge. The worst. It's the absolute worst. I'm cold plunging is a sci-op. Keep going. I love it. I I love it. We have a lake here that gets to like 2° during the winter, so. That's right. That's Celsius for you folks. >> going to say. I was going to say. Yeah. Yeah. [gasps] Um okay. Yeah, okay. So, you want people to uh you you're saying for people who to really go in this.

You know what's so funny about this, Jordan? I've retold this story a few times since we talked about it, including recently on the podcast. I think I actually think the podcast I talked about it on will come out after this. Uh I last time I had you on, I remember I kept trying to find a way to get you to say, here's how you do TikTok shop without losing a bunch of money up front. Um and >> would. Yeah, you you just refused.

You refused to say it. You were like I just kept I kept saying like and you're like, no, it's going to cost you a bunch of ad dollars and time investment and money investment and that's how you do it really good. And you know what? I love that because I I I think this is one of those like I I love having your perspective on this next thing be the same as as the other thing, which is like don't go change everything you're doing.

Let's figure out how to do it well. Let's do it with a real investment over time. I am just convinced right now that great brands have that approach to basically everything they do. They they don't look for magic anywhere. And uh and they instead say like, well, how do we actually build the right people in the right seats with the right effort and and the the right up front uh expenditures to go build something excellent.

And if you can do all of those things, then you can maximize the channel, but but the payback period isn't super super fast. And you can say all you want that Facebook is easy and I guess in some ways it is. The conversion optimization machine is awesome, but I just look at brands all the time who are still stuck on very low spends because they just have never invested the creative muscles that they need to invest. They don't know the They don't know the I don't know the time on media buying for anything.

I mean, they just They just They just haven't done it. And so, um it's it's it's harder than it looks. You know, there's a lot of brands that are stuck in the early seven figures or or less even cuz they just they can't so they can't afford it or they haven't not been able to crack it yet because it's just it is actually what's obvious and easy to you after 15 years in the game or whatever it is, you know, selling hoverboards in 2013 is uh is not to other people.

And so, uh so yeah. So, anyway, I I think that perspective is right. And in fact, if there's any one theme of my show right now, we could put a season on the Intercom a couple months ago I had Josh Durham and then uh and then I'm doing a few interviews right now with different like clients of mine who are doing all really cool, really different things with influencers. They're actually all doing interesting stuff. I I got them all together on a client knowledge share recently.

Oh, cool. I'll talk to each other because you're all doing cool stuff and it's all different than what everybody else is doing. Uh but every one of them is a bunch of effort and time and up front investment. It's understanding who their brand is. It's understanding who to work with. It's understanding when to go to a full collection drop with the influencer versus just getting a little bit of, you know, seeding product.

It's understanding the timeline from seeding to posting it. It's just all of this stuff. But because they actually care about making a real impact with their customer with their brand, it it works. It just works over time. And you compare that with great media buying on your other channels and man, you build a really really valuable machine. So, anyway, I I just I It's part of why I was like, let's get Jordan in to talk about this because I I think your perspective on this is really right, which is like there's no free lunch here, you know?

No, it's not This isn't the easy button, right? Like it's not like, oh good, Meta just created the easy button. It's like no, you now have to do all of the same things that you were doing on TikTok shop, but now on Meta with Meta creators who don't know how to sell on the on the platform yet. Just so you know, the reason why we love TikTok shop creators is because they've been building the muscles the whole time to sell on the platform.

Like when we go and we take our first client over onto Instagram shops, we're not going to be taking Instagram creators. We're not suddenly being like, let's go and find the Instagram creators to do this. It's like, no, no, no. We're going to get our top TikTok shop creators and that's what we're going to do. And send them over. Yeah, that makes sense. Um Is there anything else that you know about like the timeline of rollout and of sort of any ex- any other detail like things here related to all of this?

Or is it pretty much like it's it's it's here, go. Honestly, it was it was like just an announcement, a random announcement that they made. There's no beta, there's no anything like that. It's in seven countries so far, which is wild. There's going to be 22 markets very soon. Um and these are the only partners that they know. I have talked to every just so you guys know Andrew and I are both in the we've been in this game for a while where we have sponsors, you know.

Yeah. I have talked to every person that was a sponsor, is a sponsor cuz I have a lot of those kind of apps. Nobody knows. Yeah. You talk to all these guys all the time, what's going on? He's like Yeah. No one told us that it was happening. He knows way more about YouTube shopping and what's happening over there. Yeah. Obviously can't say. Yeah. That is much more of something that was a potential, right? Like Um Yeah, it's just wild.

It's a going to be a good time for brands, man. I'm so bullish on D2C. It's like You even use your referencing YouTube shopping as part of it. You talk about Ottiv and Refunnel. I like sought him out and still want him as a podcast sponsor at some point cuz I love that product. I think it's a great piece of software. It is it's such a good piece of soft- It's so good. If you want him as a sponsor >> already we're already talking.

I I've told him I think there'll be a take coming. It's just they're bootstrapped. profit like it's like I think it's just a it's a matter of time. But I I've sought him out and I'm happy to shout him out for free right now because I just think they're awesome. But um But I uh Yeah, I just um I I look at like you know, him you saying YouTube shopping uh also coming alongside this alongside the continued growth of TikTok Shop as a viable thing for more and more brands even with some upfront cost.

Just you put all that together, I just think people are like they're going to keep growing their businesses and they stand to just keep making a bunch of money doing this really, really well. Uh there's just yeah, there's just a lot of opportunity for for social commerce to keep developing and for And and getting more and more everything too, Andrew. Yeah, right. Of course. Right? Like that's the thing is like there's a lot of brands who cannot make money on Facebook ads right now, right?

Like the cost structure just doesn't work because they've not figured out how to get efficient in everything that they're doing. And these sorts of things now create those muscles. Probably cuz they're not working with AJF Growth, Jordan. I 100% If >> [laughter] >> only if only they worked with AJF Growth and Social Commerce Club, they'd be totally fine and they'd have so much money in the bank. We need a combo client.

That'd be fun. Um Uh yeah, okay. So uh so you just sent sent something a little bit ago, which is um it's not free, it's not easy, you have to do a bunch of stuff. We've talked about this a little bit before, but while I have you here >> pitch, eh? Like I'm just like the the consummate sales guy. No, what what I but but but while I have you here uh what what is it that people need to do to to to to get going on social commerce or to grow their social commerce reach, whether it's on TikTok Shop or anywhere else.

Um just just give people the summary of like what is the core to making success happen. We you and I've been to I've done past episodes about this, so go check my past episodes with Jordan. Um and and go check that out and of course go check Jordan's podcast as well. Jordan Where do people find that? Well, it's now I'm glad that you didn't try there, Andrew, because we I I bro- I just continue to burn the boats. I look I'm like, "Where's the boat?

I want to burn it." And [laughter] one of the boats was my podcast Secrets to Scaling Your E-commerce Brand. I had a ton of sponsor I had like 800 episodes. We were like things that were dead. Well, it's now called the Unofficial TikTok Shop Podcast. >> Oh, okay. Because I was just that much that much into it. And uh it did yeah, I had a pretty big dip there for a bit. Yeah. And then it was like, "All right, well, we're now all in on this." Okay, well, that's one of the things you got to do then.

I mean, it's it's literally the Unofficial TikTok Shop. Like go go listen to that if this is a world you're getting into. Okay, so but summarize though for people. Uh First Give me give me the baseline. Yeah. Yeah, you got to know your you got to know what you're going to invest and you have you have to know your numbers. So I have a forecaster. I'm sure it's gated. Uh it's 100% gated just so you know. You're going to have to put your email address in.

Probably like a couple of things like that. Go to socialcommerceclub.com, you'll see TikTok Shop forecaster. Go there. Figure out your numbers. It will show you when your break even is based on every single cost factor for you. Right? So figure that out and then back propagate how many resources you're going to have to add to that. Know that working with an agency is probably going to be 10K-ish a month. Right? So then you're like, "Okay, well, can I do this with I don't know, one full-time employee?" Probably not.

But like figure that out, right? Figure out what what exactly you think that you can that you can put into the channel. Do not run this off the side of your desk. If you're thinking about doing that, if you're like the VP of Growth or something, you're like, "I'm just going to try it." You're you're going to fail. Just so you know, you're going to fail. Number two, if you are a founder, listen to everything Curtis Machow is saying right now.

Curtis is >> Yeah. so good in this space. Yeah. It's incredible to have them as a client because Yeah. Curtis really understands what it takes in the creator community. So every single day he's just like recording a video just to like raw raw raw them up. And that's incredible. So when if you look and see the thread of all of the brands that have done well their founder is heavily involved. Look at Hudson, right? Look at Comfort.

In there constantly. Look at Neurogum. Constantly in there. All of the like we spend so much money. I was asking I was like, "How many how many salaries of community managers do we have?" It's like 20 community managers or something that we have right now. Like wild. That's all people just talking all the time to creators. That is where the leverage is. All of the leverage is with the creators. That's it. Like the ads portion like the GMV max and and all of that is like fairly simple.

Um There's obviously like we still have one media buyer per pod. So it's like we're still media buying, but it's not to the same extent. It's not the same levers that we used to have to pull. So yeah, so that's great. Um And then just follow And then just go to my YouTube channel and Yeah. just binge watch all of I've barely talked about anything on YouTube that isn't still true now. Like the Blitz methodology there, momentum methodology, all of it.

Just go like go binge that and and and do that, but just if you're going to do it, go all in on the channel and then do the same thing over on Instagram afterwards, but don't try and do both at the same time, which is why we're not launching a service yet. Yeah. Let's just wait. So Yeah. Yeah, I mean, they probably won't have tons of volume, tons of scale to start unless they unless There I always wonder about first mover advantages on things like this.

Um which is like is it possible that there'll be a bunch of sort of like algo boosts for these people as they try to get the program off the ground and all that kind of stuff, you know. It does. Yeah. mean, I dude, I just had a meeting with like the a guy a guy at TikTok. I won't say who it is. Yeah. like, "Hey, so there's this special program." And in this special program Yeah. you get your brands get certain things like this.

And they're all like algorithm boosting things. Yeah, yeah. Like they just game the algorithm all the time for brands that they want to be in, which is what we get. So Right. Right. Yeah, it's pretty great. I I wonder if there will be especially that right now with the first mover kind of thing for for for Instagram and Facebook. I think you're probably right that people auto are going to have to expect to build the muscle somehow.

Um but you know, it could be interesting to see if you've got one thing I would probably do right now is if you have right now who you have a good relationship with and they're trying any of this kind of stuff, it may be worth just beginning to see like you know, like if if like let's see what happens if you start posting. What happens if we start boosting those posts? Like there's just like there's just there's some questions there for me about about going and beginning to test that.

It's probably what I would do and probably what I will be telling my clients is is uh you know, I I don't understand the mechanics of all this, let's learn them together. Uh and let's and let's see what happens if you've already got those relationships. I know a lot of people in the meta ad space already have a bunch of white listing relationships, right? So like, "Okay, well, now what happens if you go and and create content and then add a shoppable right there." I would be interested.

So Uh all right, Jordan. Uh thanks so much for doing this. Any last things you want to say about about Facebook, Instagram, uh shop, uh affiliate shopping, anything that we didn't cover that is is important for people to get their head around before we sign off? Just for all This is the only thing I came to mind, Andrew, okay? For all of you brands that criticized TikTok Shop for all of these last couple of years and said it wasn't going to work, wasn't going to be there.

Did people do that? Yes. Oh my gosh, the amount of people that would just be like and feel sorry for me. They're like, "I can't believe you're in this." Like like it's not going to be a thing and they're going to get shut down. It is now the future, right? It's the future of the way that people advertise. And so like it's just not optional anymore to at least figure that portion of it out. And if you're going to hire UGC creators, just invest in the channels.

Just invest in the channels instead. And also this thing about first mover advantage, it's still first mover advantage on TikTok Shop. Uh Every category I'm like, "There's nobody there. There's nobody there." Like people don't realize it's still first mover advantage. That's crazy. I would not have guessed that. That's fascinating. Um all right, go follow all of Jordan's stuff that we plugged aggressively during this show, which I'm very happy to do cuz uh like I said like it was my immediate reaction to this news was, "Get Jordan.

Just where's Jordan? Need him on the podcast to talk about it." Go check out Social Commerce Club if you're a brand that is looking to to scale up social commerce in your business. Uh and Jordan, thanks so much, man. Appreciate it. Always good to talk to >> Andrew, I really appreciate you making time to do this so fast and I hope this is helpful for everyone. I'm sure it will be. All right. >> [music] >> I already told you about all the great places to go follow up with Jordan, but do go do that.

The Unofficial TikTok Shop Podcast, Social Commerce Club. All the links for all those are in the show notes. Jordan is awesome, really knows his stuff, great dude, really kind and helpful person, sincerely wants to help. So, go follow up with him there. Big thanks to him for making time on very short notice to get us some information about Instagram and Facebook affiliate shops and all that kind of stuff. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you're watching or listening.

I have a bunch more great episodes coming up including some more around this influencer kind of stuff like I was talking about with Jordan. It's sort of the theme of a lot of my episodes right now because of what I'm seeing from clients of mine where I am actually looking under the hood of the metrics and I understand at this point >> [music] >> or I can see with a lot of clarity who is doing stuff that's really moving the needle with influencers and it's really cool to see the impact it's having on some brands I'm working with.

So, you're not going to want to miss that cuz I can tell you for sure it's working for these brands and you're going to want to learn from that. Subscribe, like I said, wherever you're watching. Don't forget to comment as well. It's probably one of the best ways to get a hold of me. I look at every comment that comes through. So, so leave a comment and then I'd love to interact with you whether you're on YouTube or Spotify or whatever.

And of course, go to ajfgrowth.com for interested in working with us and what we are doing. You can email me also at podcast@ajfgrowth.com. Either of those are a great way to get a hold of me. Fill out the intake form ajfgrowth.com for interested in working with our team so we can learn a little bit about your business and go from there. Thanks so much to Intelligems and to More Staffing. The links for both of those are also in the show notes.

Great sponsors that I love. Go check them out. Thanks to you for watching or for listening. I'll see you next time.