Ecom Breakfast | The Real Reason TikTok Shop Was Bleeding Us £1,500 a Day

We jumped into TikTok Shop with almost no experience and scaled to £6,000 a day in sales, thinking it was a huge win. It wasn't. Underneath those numbers, we were losing between £1,000 and £1,500 a day and had no idea until we finally unpicked the real costs: commissions, ad fees, promotional costs, and shipping all hidden across different screens inside the platform. In this episode, I walk through exactly what went wrong, how we found the software that finally showed us the truth, and the full rebuild that followed: restructuring our offer, creating a dedicated sample product, and, the biggest shift, treating TikTok Shop as a creative engine for our Meta ads rather than a standalone profit channel (the "halo effect" strategy). I also cover the mistakes I'd fix if starting again, why unit economics matter more than sales numbers, and what it actually takes to run TikTok Shop properly, including the team, the systems, and the creator relationships behind it. If you're an e-commerce founder considering TikTok Shop, or already in it and something feels off, this one's for you. I'm Luke Brame, co-founder and CEO of LNT, welcome to Ecom Breakfast.