Meet Dylan Rudzinski, the mastermind behind an incredible e-commerce achievement that's worth talking about. He made $570 000 in sales in over just 5 days, all thanks to TikTok ads. Yeah, you read that right!
In this article, we're diving into the details of how Rudzinski pulled off this jaw-dropping success. From selecting the right products, building an online store, and creating eye-catching ads to scaling his product to making 6 figures in less than a week.
All these sales came straight from TikTok Ads, without using any retargeting campaign. Rudzinski's approach isn't just a game-changer; it's like a blueprint for making the most out of today's e-commerce space. So, grab your seat as we unpack how this e-commerce wizard turned a simple idea into a major success story, all by riding the TikTok wave.
We have left the story in his own words and only edited it for clarity and context.
Dylan Rudzinski
About the Product
This was not a black hat, scammy subscription offer type product. This was a real product that we were actually sending to customers. The product in this case study was attached to a very short-lived but really large trend on TikTok. The audience for the product was a very passionate audience, me and my partner Ben saw this in our AOV when customers were buying all sorts of other products related to the main product, which really helped our margin a lot.
When we found the product, there were really no competitors at all. Another thing is this product was extremely simple, very easy to source, and it was low ticket. We were able to source it for under ten dollars, and there were no customizations done at all.
Product Research
In terms of how we found the products, we actually found them on Amazon's Movers and Shakers. Pretty much, it's the biggest gainer in sales rank over the past 24 hours. So this is definitely a great way to keep an eye out on like really hot trending products.
And, this product, in particular, I'm not going to say what category it was in, but it was on position number 1 and 2 on the movers and shakers for probably two weeks at least.
And here's the search volume for the main keyword for the product according to Helium 10:
Clearly, a huge spike in search volume around early July, and that's right when we got in and ran the product. So we were just in time.
The main Amazon listing was doing around $800 000 a month, which we were able to check through Helium 10. And then once we found the product, we checked on competitors. As I said earlier, there was almost no competition at all in terms of drop shippers.
We checked on all of the ad spy tools. There was only one store running ads for this product, and they were using bad creatives. We then ordered the product on Amazon tested it and made our video creatives.
Store Setup
For the Shopify store setup. We used the debut theme, and this was a very simple branded store. Our page had very short descriptions and reviews. We just made sure that we don’t interrupt the customer's journey to actually buying the product.
We had a really clean and simple product page with just two color themes. Now, since this product was a very short-term product, we just scaled with images straight from AliExpress, and we did completely fine with that. Our conversion rate was very high. But if you have a more long-term product, I would highly recommend getting nice high-quality custom photos showing off the product.
We actually did test a countdown timer. It was actually an inventory kind of FOMO bar. It said “There are only X units left in stock”, and it worked extremely well. Make sure if you do a countdown timer or an inventory bar or whatever it is that it looks really clean, it matches the branding on your site, and it just doesn't look scammy. That's really important.
We kept the offer very simple. It was just a 50% or 60% off sale on all products on the site, and that worked extremely well. Once we knew the product was a winner, we started testing cross-sales of products that were very similar to the original one. Another offer you can add is if your product is something that's often purchased more than once, doing a buy one get one extra, works extremely well. We also did that.
And lastly, our abandoned cart email flows. Our abandoned cart flows were extremely FOMO-based because this was kind of a short-term store, and that really helped us recover a lot of lost revenue.
As far as the testing phase goes, we used custom content to test the product. And if you guys aren't doing that with TikTok ads right now, you're missing out on a lot of winning products with the currency of the e-commerce industry and TikTok ads. I don't think stealing creatives is an actual sustainable strategy to finding winning products. Now what's great is we were actually able to make creatives ourselves with this product. We actually scaled with creatives made ourselves, so that's an extremely affordable and efficient way to get a product test up. As far as the testing campaign structure goes, when it comes to a product that's this big of a winner, you could literally throw up anything, and you'll know it's a winning product.
Testing Phase
My usual go-to testing strategy is going to be a $100 CBO campaign with 5 ad groups, 5 creatives with 3 sets of ad copy. Now you could do 3 ad groups, 4 ad groups, or whatever works best for you. It really doesn't matter at the end of the day. If a product's a winner, it's going to get sales.
One thing that was really interesting about this product test is at the beginning of the day, the KPIs were not looking good at all. For those of you guys that don't know what KPIs are, that's just key performance indicators, and that's going to be like your CTR, your CPM, your CPA, et cetera, and none of those were looking good at all for us. The CPMS were extremely high, CPC made no sense, and CTR was looking bad.
It wasn't until the latter half of the day that it really started looking good. And once it started getting good in the afternoon on that first day, we actually surged the CBO, which is just increasing the budget. We went from $100 to $200, and we ended the day with $1 500 in revenue at a 7x ROAS.
So here's day one of running ads. As you can see, we really didn't start getting a lot of sales until later in the day. The reason why I wanted to mention that is you guys should always let your initial testing campaign run for at least one day, just to really let the campaign optimize and figure out who is actually buying this product and who's interested.
On the first day, we spent $182 dollars on ads, and this was just simply after trying to double the budget of that initial CBO.
Going into this product, we knew it was going to be a short-term kind of pump-and-dump style product. So right when I saw these results, I scheduled tons of ads for the next day, and you're going to see in the analytics how fast we really scaled up.
Scaling Aggressively
We were able to scale past $100 000 per day in just four days of running the product, and I'll go ahead and show you.
We weren't running this product at all before. As you can see, just started right here, went from $1 500 to $17 000 to $34 000, $90 000, and then $130 000. By the way, $130 000 falls just short of the best day we've ever done, which was $137 000 from last Black Friday.
Now what's important to understand about how fast we scaled is scaling this aggressively isn't possible unless your ROAS is insane at low ad spend. So if we test the product and the ROAS was maybe 2.5x on a couple of $100s of spend, we wouldn't just scale to $130 000 in like 3 days. There are levels to how good a winning product is.
We only used one ad account to scale this product, and it was not an agency account. I'm going to be talking a lot more about ad account structure and scaling strategies in other videos, but just keep in mind that we're not using an agency account at all.
Media buying strategy
So with the media buying strategy, we were pretty much doing everything. Now there were a few campaign structures that were working the best, and I'm going to show you guys one of them before I get into the ads manager. Just keep in mind the attribution was about 50% off while scaling this product. So TikTok tracked 14 167 conversions when we actually did over 26 000 orders.
Ad account screenshot:
Shopify screenshot:
One scaling strategy that was working extremely well for us was just mass duplicating manual bids. So this is with Broad and automatic targeting, and this is about 5 to 7 creatives per ad group. And what you want to do is just test a ton of bids within the range of your desired CPA.
And then once you find a bid that's working, just go up and down by $0.01 and just spam duplicate ad groups. From my experience, a $200 budget works best, and as you can see here, you're literally just going to like get low CPAs at scale:
Now with a strategy like this, you want to be very careful because sometimes manual bids can just not work and spend a ton of budget. Also, every day you want to turn off the manual bids from the day before and launch new ones. It can be a very time-intensive process when you're scaling to 6- figures a day, but it's one of the best ways to get extremely high ROAS purchases at scale.
Maintaining Cashflow at Scale
So when you scale this aggressively, especially over a weekend, you might be wondering how we were actually able to sustain this level of scale. The cash flow was from our ad account which actually had a line of credit. And we have an AMEX card that has hundreds of thousands of dollars of spending limit. So we had two lines of credits and we had a ton of cash. Cash flow was not an issue at all when scaling this product.
Ad Account Issues
Now when you do scale this aggressively, you will inevitably run into ad account and payment processing issues, and we actually did about a week into scaling the products.
As you can see in the screenshot above, it was a Monday when our ad account got suspended, and we weren't able to get that original ad account up until a couple of weeks later.
Now we did get decent results afterwards that took us to earning over $800 000 in revenue but nowhere near as good as the results we were getting during the initial scale. This is obviously easier said than done. I think if the ad account didn't initially get suspended that Monday, we could have easily gotten to $1 000 000 in sales within the next 2 days. And this would have been 0 to $1 000 000 in sales in one week.
Every time we tried to run the ads or the product on another ad account, it just instantly got flagged and banned. So that's why we had a big period where we were not getting sales because we had to wait until that original ad account suspension got lifted.
Once it got lifted, we were able to run the product again for maybe 5-10 days doing around $20 000 a day. And then we eventually got suspended again. At that point, TikTok was literally not letting us run this product or the ads.
Results
So now I'm going to briefly break down the margin. These estimates are very rough, but they are very close to what the net profit was at the end of the day:
This product generated just over $800 000 in revenue. I showed you guys in the dashboard earlier. We sourced this product at $8.80 per unit. We tested it, and it cost $10 dollars. This is extremely important when you guys are scaling a product. Make sure to compare your supplier against other suppliers to get that price down as low as possible.
Now, we did ship to Canada and the United Kingdom basically the big five countries, but it was mainly the U.S. And the price averages out to $8.80 anyway. As you can see here, we sold just over 29 000 of the main products:
The product that we sold 3 400 of was actually only 20 cents to add to the order. This was one of our post-purchase cross-sells.
These other three products, of which I sold a few hundred, were sourced at the same price as that main product. They were just different styles of the main product that customers could buy. So, 31 163 units times $880, which was our sourcing cost, gives us a cost of goods sold (COGS) of $274 234.
I added $1 200 for that one product that did 3 400 units. It was only 20-30 cents to add to the order; it was a very cheap product.
The ad spend was $227 000, and I had to update that. I was actually wrong with the number previously. I'll go ahead and show you guys the proof of this in the ad account:
The lifetime spend is right there, and as you can see, the spend clearly correlates with the sales graph of our product on Shopify:
So, this is a completely rough profit estimate. This could be plus or minus probably $10 000 to $20 000, but we get $306 000 in profit. 50% of this was split with my partner, Ben. So, yeah, I really hope you guys appreciated the transparency here. And that is it with case study.
Conclusion
Overall, product selection, timing, store setup, and ad strategy were key factors in Dylan's immediate success with this store. With the right approach and tools, it's possible to achieve great results like this. Keep in mind to stay on top of trends, find the right products, and optimize your store and ad strategy to get the best results.
