Tiktok shop is too easy! But whatβs the catch? 1. US INVENTORY You cannot dropship out of China meaning you will need to purchase bulk. I own a 3pl that specializes in tiktok shop fulfillment so if your buying bulk and need a fulfillment center we got you! 2. CASH CYCLE Tiktok cash cycle is a little longer than most people are used to. That being said you need to buy the inventory upfront, then pay for fulfillment, and then wait around 8 days after delivery to get your money. This can become faster with time! 3. CHINESE NEW YEARS Right now China is about to SHUT DOWN! Meaning if you do want to buy bulk to sell in February you have to act fast and get these orders in asap before China turns off. They will be back mid-late Feb. 4. # OF ACCOUNTS Tiktok shop is like Amazon. Amazon limits 1 store per household. Although tiktok doesnβt do it like that they do limit you by SSN and EIN on how many stores you can have. This has become my biggest bottleneck. Approvals for 20-30 stores is difficult 5. AFFILIATE VS ADS We start our shops with the affiliate model. Essentially considering the cost of samples we send out as our ad spend. Once our cash cycle starts we introduce ads. Ads make the cash cycle hurt even worse because more upfront cost. 6. AFFILIATE OUTREACH To scale on tiktok shop like crazy you need hundreds of affiliates. Outreach to the affiliates can take hours a day. We created a bot that is available to the public to do 1000-2000 outreaches a day for you! 7. DATA COLLECTION You do not get as much customer data as you would on shopify, similar to Amazon again. But we have a few tricks up our sleeve to recover that. (Need to be in my 3pl for this one)