When 23-year-old George Robinson started working for his family’s sweet shop SoSweet in 2020, his objective was to grow the business’ online presence. At the time, SoSweet was a popular brick-and-mortar candy store based out of Devon, England.
Robinson started off by creating an e-commerce website and social-media accounts for the store on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. But it was TikTok that really catapulted SoSweet into online fame.
During Christmas season that year, one video recreating a scene from the British sitcom “Gavin & Stacey” went viral, and got the account to 20,000 followers in a few days.
Robinson doubled down on content and found ways to interact with potential customers. He replied to as many comments as possible, gave discounts to his TikTok followers, and created videos where he showed himself or someone from his team packing customer orders. He said his team posted 30 to 40 videos a day for almost two months.
“We saw it as an entertainment platform, and we focused on making that connection between entertainment and driving sales online and driving people into our stores,” Robinson said.
For the following year, he focused on growing the e-commerce website and hired more people to help out with fulfilling orders and creating content.
The @sosweetdevon account had 800,000 followers by March 2022, when Robinson began using TikTok Shop, the platform’s shopping feature that allows in-app purchases. He soon established a relationship with the TikTok Shop team, who have been helping him navigate the platform and boost sales.
TikTok Shop launched in the UK in 2021 as part of TikTok’s effort to make e-commerce a key component of its offering. The feature officially launched in the US this month after almost a year of beta testing. The company has plans to quadruple the size of its online shopping business by the end of 2023, bringing it to $20 billion, Bloomberg reported.
SoSweet makes well above six figures a month from the platform alone. In August, a relatively slow month for sales, it made about $175,000 in revenue (£141,000). Insider verified this information with documentation Robinson provided. Robinson says the lifetime sales of SoSweet products on TikTok Shop are over $2.5 million (£2 million).
Because of its success, the story of SoSweet is one that TikTok loves to tell, and in recent months, Robinson has become a sort of poster child for the ways in which TikTok Shop can bolster the growth of small businesses.
As TikTok champions SoSweet, it has also begun cracking down on other types of food items that it deems unauthorized, like homemade candy and desserts.
Virality is a key component for success on TikTok Shop — and it can make or break a business
Before finding success on TikTok Shop, Robinson and his team already had experience with e-commerce, which made it easier to deal with the inflow of new online orders coming from Shop.
“We had lines of credit and great relationships with suppliers,” Robinson said. “If we had just started a [TikTok] Shop and didn’t have the rest of the business, we probably wouldn’t have been able to keep up, we would have become a victim of it.”
TikTok Shop rules around order fulfillment are strict. Merchants only have four working days to ship orders, or limitations and warnings might be placed on their account.
That makes it tough for sellers to fulfill orders on time when a products go viral, particularly when it comes to small businesses who don’t keep a lot of stock.
Robinson said the support from TikTok has also been instrumental in ensuring on-time delivery. Robinson’s account manager helps out with order and fulfillment issues of all kinds, and he introduced SoSweet to Fulfilled by TikTok, an Amazon-like logistics solution.
With FBT, some of the merchant’s stock is held in TikTok-operated warehouses for a fee, so that if a product becomes particularly successful on the platform, TikTok handles the storage and shipping. Robinson did not specify how much the fee is, but said it’s significantly lower than on other e-commerce platforms he’s used.
Robinson also gets an inside look at seasonal campaigns and trends coming up on the platform, so that he can leverage them. TikTok gives SoSweet content targets to hit, like how many videos to post or how long to livestream for each time. In exchange, TikTok promises continued support and more help in the future.
A key driver of success for SoSweet has been a network of over 20,000 affiliate creators that have been marketing the products in exchange for a cut of sales. Sellers can set their own affiliate commission, and SoSweet offers 10% to creators — in line with the average, as TikTok’s UK GM of e-commerce previously told Insider.
To spread the firsthand knowledge he’s gained, Robinson recently started his own TikTok Shop Partner agency, to consult for small businesses on how to get started on TikTok Shop and how to use it for sales.
At the same time, he continues to keep the brick-and-mortar business a priority. SoSweet now has 10 locations across the UK, and the plan is open 20 by 2025.
“We run a very successful business anyway, and if you take TikTok away from that, we still have a great business,” he said. “TikTok just really complements what we do.”
Read the full article here