TikTok Shop Built Its Own Prime
Plus a 500 million view failure and TikTok ranking restaurants
Hi friends!
Another packed issue of Sell! Sell! Sell! - Your weekly hit of social commerce news.
This week, TikTok started charging shoppers a monthly fee, an AI company explained why 500 million views were worth almost nothing, and TikTok also appointed itself a restaurant critic.
Let’s dig in.
November 10th
🛒 TikTok Shop now charges shoppers (!) $9.99 a month
TikTok Shop started piloting TikTok Shop Plus over the weekend, a $9.99 a month membership for more than 1 million people it calls its most loyal US customers. It buys free shipping on badged items, an extra 10% off, three coupons a month and instant refunds as store credit. Amazon Prime is $14.99. Walmart+ is $12.95.
For three years, buying on Shop started with a creator video. A membership starts with a renewal date, and it landed a day before Shop’s Black Friday window opens. Nobody has said who funds the free shipping or the 10%. If it is the seller, the cost of being on Shop just changed with no published rate.
🧠 Wispr Flow killed a 500 million view creator program
Hector Serrano runs content at Wispr Flow, an AI company valued at $2 billion. He had been paying creators on a CPM basis to post from alternate accounts. It did about 500 million views in two and a half months, converted almost nobody, and he shut it down. The replacement is 50 creators making 500 to 600 paid ads a month, paid on results.
Twenty five videos guarantees $1,500. If commissions land under that, the brand tops the creator up. If they clear it, the floor disappears. Most move to pure commission within four months, settled every seven days. Serrano never said how many actually clear the floor, which is the number that decides whether this is generous or just well designed.
🍪 TikTok made itself a restaurant critic
TikTok built a restaurant guide. Must Eat ranks places using more than 40 million posts, reviews and comments, sorts them into Everyday Eats and Elevated Dining, and lets you book through OpenTable in app. It started in New York, Los Angeles and the Bay Area. TikTok says no restaurant can pay to be featured.
No restaurant can pay TikTok. A restaurant can still comp a creator a meal, and under FTC rules that is a material connection the creator has to disclose. TikTok’s ranking cannot tell a disclosed comp from an undisclosed one, so the guide’s honesty rests on creators labelling their own posts. Creator content is now ranked, bookable inventory, and the money shaping it is invisible to the thing doing the ranking.
🎤 Seller Spotlight
One shop is pulling away from the rest
medicube US Store did $31.38 million on TikTok Shop in October, 96% more than second place Comfrt at $16.00 million. In September the gap between first and second was $5.92 million. Now it is $15.38 million. The whole top ten did $125.98 million, up 26.7% on September. These are Kalodata estimates, not TikTok’s own numbers.
The middle is still churning: QVC, Crocs, Dolls Kill, Fashion Nova and Halara all sit between $8.19 million and $10.29 million, close enough that next month reshuffles them.
The top is not: medicube pulled away from a pack it was part of eight weeks ago.
@medicube_official Some lovely moments from our interview with Nic & Benji at medicube’s London pop-up! 💗 And now, we’re bringing the medicube experience to ... See more
A leader doing nearly double second place is a different market from ten shops trading places. All year TikTok Shop rewarded whoever ran hardest that month. Somebody has found something repeatable, and what changed in October matters more than what medicube sells.
🧠 Brand Move of the Week
Loop stopped arguing with finance and bought a budget line
Two weeks ago we ran Ulta’s CMO still arguing with her own CFO over whether creator content counts as working media. Rob Weston at Loop Earplugs took the other route. He carved roughly 10% of marketing budget out of performance spend and planned it at a return on ad spend of 1, against 2.5 to 3 for everything else. He calls it an insurance bet.
He agreed the measure with the CEO and CFO before launch, not after the results came in. Finance signed off on something that looks like breaking even, which is what lets a creator budget survive a bad quarter. Revenue went from about $100 million three years ago to a projected $240 to $250 million this year, both company figures.
A pool planned at a ROAS of 1 with no strict target is one reorganisation away from being a slush fund. Finance agreeing the measure first is the only thing holding it in place.
📰 Other news you should look at for this week
Calls to action do not appear to do anything on Instagram. Metricool read 2,526 captions from 71 US ecommerce brands last August. Within the same brand, captions asking for a click performed the same as captions that did not. One month, small sample, no effect size published. 📎 Read more
Facebook is offering some creators $5,000 to publish a video series. This comes from creator posts rather than a Meta announcement. It arrives the same month Instagram’s own head said paying video creators loses money by a long shot. 📎 Read more
Depop cut shoppable edits from a creator show. The Chicken Shop Date finale with Amelia Dimoldenberg now has clips you can buy straight out of. Small, but it is the cleanest content to cart mechanic anyone shipped this week. 📎 Read more
Ok, see you next week. In the meantime, Sell! Sell! Sell! 🫡