Your TikTok Shop numbers are lying to you

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Picture this. A buyer opens ChatGPT and asks for a recommendation in your category. Your competitor's name comes up. Yours doesn't. And that buyer never makes it to your website.

That's happening right now in markets everywhere. And most teams don't know it's happening because it never shows up in their analytics.

HubSpot AEO shows you exactly where your brand stands in AI search, where competitors are getting recommended instead of you, and tells you specifically what to fix. No expertise needed.

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Ian Page is the founder of Bullseye Sellers, a TikTok Shop agency that has taken brands from zero to $75,000 a month on the platform.

Most TikTok buyers don't buy on TikTok. Ian surveyed his shopper network and found that 62% went to Amazon after seeing a product on TikTok. Another 11% went to the brand's website. Only 28% bought on TikTok itself.

Which means if you're running TikTok Shop and only watching your TikTok revenue, you're seeing less than a third of what the platform is actually doing for you.

His top client sells an eczema skincare product and does $75,000 a month on TikTok Shop.

But their Amazon listing for the same product is up 3x since they started. Their DTC site saw a 25% lift. Before TikTok, they were slowly losing market share because competitors were outbidding them on cost per click and they couldn't keep up.

Two years of slow decline. TikTok reversed it without touching their Amazon spend.

The way Ian thinks about it: TikTok generates five to eight million impressions a month for that brand. Most of those impressions never convert on TikTok. They convert later, somewhere else, when the person goes looking for the product they saw on their couch at 11pm. You don't see that sale in your TikTok dashboard. But it's still your sale.

If you only measure what TikTok directly closes, you're undervaluing the channel and probably underinvesting in it.

Action Summary:

Credit: Steve Chou

David Hooker is a growth lead at Printify, a print-on-demand platform that fulfills to over 190 countries.

In this podcast, he shared his playbook for launching a print-on-demand store that actually sells.

Know who you're designing for

Shoppers are picky. David was looking at World Cup t-shirts recently and passed on one because he didn't like the orange on the logo. The rest of the shirt was perfect. That's who you're up against as a seller, and no AI tool is going to tell you which design clears that bar. You have to know your buyer well enough to make that call yourself.

Cross-niche instead of going broad

A niche like "dad jokes" is saturated. Instead, layer two niches together. Pittsburgh poodle owners. Yoga moms who love poodles in Pittsburgh. Cross-niching gives you a smaller, more specific buyer and less competition. Use tools like E-rank or Etsy's sales data to validate demand before you design for it.

List more than you think you need

Printify's top sellers make 65 to 70% of their revenue from just 30 to 35% of their products. The rest doesn't sell, but it still matters. A store with 10 designs doesn't feel like a brand. The store experience is what builds trust and gets someone to click. List a lot, test everything, and when a design works on a t-shirt, put it on a mug, a tote bag, and a pair of shorts.

Don't skip samples

Order your own products before you start selling. Know what the buying experience feels like. Then run traffic through Meta ads on Instagram and Facebook, once your store is set up and converting.

Action Summary:

🎙️ Listen to the episode here: YouTube| Spotify | Amazon

Some Amazon and Shopify sellers are paying agencies $12,000 to $20,000 a month to plant fake recommendations on Reddit, knowing that 40% of ChatGPT answers pull from Reddit threads. The strategy works, until it doesn't.

Reddit's moderation has gotten good at spotting coordinated accounts, and ewen it catches you, it doesn't ban one account. It bans all of them. 

One seller lost 23 accounts in a single afternoon because he was managing them from the same IP address. Two years of karma-building, gone. 

A supplement brand spent eight months moderating two subreddits, pulling 4,000 visitors a month, until someone noticed they were removing competitor mentions. Reddit stripped their moderator status in 48 hours and both subreddits turned hostile overnight.

The smarter play costs nothing but time.

Search your product category plus "recommendations" on Reddit, find threads where buyers are already asking for help, and post one genuine response: problem first, what you tried before, your product once with a specific result. No links unless someone asks. 

Action Summary:

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Brands chasing visibility in AI search are reallocating SEO, content and creator budgets ahead of any paid AI search ad placements.

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Tariff rebates trimmed BJ's overall retail prices by roughly half a percentage point. The chain is passing the refund cycle directly into shelf prices.

via Retail Dive • Read more

Viktor reads overnight tickets, tags them by product area, summarizes the patterns, and posts a brief in #support. The agent picks up the queue already triaged. The PM sees recurring requests rolled up by Friday.

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