One of Britain’s first TikTok shop sellers shares how live-streaming seven days a week on TikTok has allowed him to expand his business across multiple markets
A UK-based TikTok Shop seller has revealed how he made close to a hundred thousand pounds in under 12 hours purely by sticking on his phone camera.
While the app is best known for its viral dance videos and wacky trends, it’s actually home to a thriving marketplace. In fact, there are currently over 200,000 sellers on TikTok Shop in the UK, and with more British businesses opting to sell directly through the platform, it’s become something of a gold rush.
It’s what inspired Gloucestershire local Luke Arnel-Cameron to launch his own cleaning product business, Yass Clean, entirely through the app back in 2022. He was one of the first British business owners to make the leap. But, while a seemingly unorthodox route, Luke describes it as a “natural transition”.
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Previously, Luke had a TikTok channel where he reviewed products for brands like L’Oréal and Dyson, which garnered him over a million followers. This gave him the foundation he needed to launch his own product. He says: “I had a good sense of what would work and what wouldn’t work by understanding my customer base – or what were to be my customer base.”
Plus, he’d also seen the success that other brands had using “discovery commerce”, which is basically a shopping approach where consumers are matched with products without actively seeking them out. “It’s so much easier for your brand and your product to get discovered much quicker to a much wider audience,” Luke says.
For him, there were two main features available in TikTok Shop that helped his business expand. The first was FBT (or Fulfilled by TikTok), which is a logistics service for TikTok Shop merchants. Essentially, it means that the app handles the storage, picking, packing, and shipping of products – allowing sellers to focus on marketing.
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Luke shares: “We’ve been able to scale our business much quicker and much bigger than what we could have physically done ourselves. If I had to stock and I was fulfilling it, obviously that comes along with a bigger space, more staff, and more regulation around health and safety and manual handling. Whereas FBT has literally enabled us to just click go.”
He doesn’t worry about the increase in demand as his business has grown, either. He adds: “As we are getting more orders in and more stock, they can scale because they’ve got a lot of people at their warehouse to be able to handle that influx.”
However, another major factor has been the ability to go live. TikTok LIVE is a feature that allows creators (or sellers) to interact with viewers in real time. The feature is available for those who are over 18 and, in most regions, who have over 1000 followers. In the UK, the app is used for over 6000 LIVE shopping sessions every day.
Luke’s very first TikTok LIVE saw him sell over £70,000 worth of product in less than 12 hours. Since, he’s expanded his business to incorporate a whole team of live streamers who operate for roughly 14 hours seven days a week.
Going live gives them more than just exposure, it also allows them to interact with customers in real-time and respond to requests. Given that many of Luke’s products are scented, he explains that it also allows his team to describe the unique smells to potential customers.
Luke says: “LIVE is our DNA. It is how we’ve built the brand and built the business, because we’ve got a real face to it. It’s our shop window.”
His unique business approach has now allowed Luke to sell over 300,000 boxes of product in just eight months. Now, he has plans to expand even further, after launching in the US market.
He also puts much of this growth down to live-streaming. “The lovely thing about being so present on social media is that we do get a lot of great feedback from customers,” he says. “We do take the opportunity to ask on livestream, ‘Hi, guys, what do you think about this new product? Do you think this would be a good idea?’ It’s almost like a focus group.”
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