Jordan West

E-Com Investor & Podcast Host | Multiple Exits| Avid Golfer, Biker + Hiker | Dad Of 3 | CEO + CMO | Mastermind Host

My Journey 
When I was 23 I decided to buy a Taco Del Mar restaurant... I knew I had made a huge mistake at 2pm the first day when only 3 customers had walked in... (and two of them were my parents haha) 
For 5 years I worked hard to grow sales every way I could think of and in the end, tripled our revenue which still didn't seem to matter on the profit side. (I lost a lot of money 💰)

The one thing that I seemed to be the best at in the restaurant endeavor was marketing and getting people in the door. 

Fast forward to 2014 when my wonderful wife Carmen (definitely my better half) started a modest baby clothing line and was selling at craft markets. 

I asked if I could test running a few ads on Facebook... and the rest is history. I learned every up-and-coming strategy and tactic and helped grow the small start-up to a multi-million dollar company and still growing!

Since then we have acquired multiple DTC brands and have built an agency (upGrowth Commerce) to service our brands as well as others who are in a similar situation to us!

In 2019 we started the podcast "secrets to scaling your e-commerce brand" which is now in the top 50 business/marketing podcasts in multiple countries including Canada and the United States.

I love connecting with people, so please connect. (I do have a no a**holes policy though, so don't connect if that's you.) 

I talk all about scaling businesses using paid ads on “Secrets To Scaling Your E-Commerce Brand”.

Chief Executive Officer

I made this post a few months ago... and this HAS CHANGED MY LIFE. 
I have an airport hack for ALL OF YOU! (that may just change your life) 

Lately... at the airport I've been doing something kind of weird. 

You probably wouldn't peg me for this kind of person but here it is. 

I've been...

1. Putting my phone in my pocket 
2. Not having airpods in. 
3. Talking to whoever is around me that looks interesting and doesn't have their head buried in their phone. 

And HERE'S the WILD THING! 

Today alone I made 2 insane connections... 

the first was a nice couple that was sitting beside me in the emergency exit row. 

They turned out to own (with another group) a bunch of motel properties that I had been eyeing for a MASSIVE RESORT that i think could be an insanely huge attraction for the city I live in. I had been thinking about it for a while and it's crazy that they just happened to be beside me on a random flight. Many more other connections too... but I digress. 

The second was a random guy who runs point for one of the largest inference chip companies in the world helping put in data centres... 

Well I just happen to have a local data centre deal that I've been dreaming up for my town. 

The first convo actualy helped steer me in a totally different LIFE direction than I was thinking about for the next 5-10 years TBH (not exaggerating) 

So... the lesson. 

Get off your effing phone 
Talk to people. 
The universe/god/life wants to give you good things... but you won't get them staring at your phone or sitting in your office. 

they are out there! 
Anyone else ever have moments like these?

I AM HIRING NA-BASED SOCIAL COMMERCE STRATEGISTS AT Social Commerce Club! 
We are opening two pods a month right now and not slowing down any time soon. 

If you have TikTok shop experience and/or can learn fast and consider yourself a fast learner and have DTC experience, PLEASE DM ME! 

Our core values 

Low ego learners 
High agency executers
Move with competitive speed 

If this sounds like you... 
DM ME 
We're on a rocketship.

Our culture is amazing. 
Our people are amazing. 
Come join us! (or if you know anyone let me know!)

Most brands still think TikTok Shop and Amazon are competing channels...

They're not.

Heres what we're seeing at SCC 👇

TikTok content goes viral → product gets discovered by Hundreds of THOUSANDS of new buyers

Those buyers go to Amazon to "check reviews" before they buy then some buy on amazon.

Amazon ranking jumps because of the search volume spike and search, find, buy. (the holy grail of Amazon rankings)

Higher Amazon ranking = more organic Amazon sales

More Amazon sales = more budget to put back into TikTok creators

Round and round it goes...

The brands that figured this out are printing. 

The ones treating each channel separately are leaving MASSIVE money on the table 💰

HIRING AT Social Commerce Club (sales people!) 
WE ARE HIRING NA Based sales people who can be up and running within 2 weeks! (yes FAST!)

If you have TikTok shop experience and/or can learn fast and consider yourself a fast learner and have DTC experience, PLEASE DM ME! 

Our core values 

Low ego learners 
High agency executers
Move with competitive speed 

If this sounds like you... 
DM ME 
We're on a rocketship.

Our culture is amazing. 
Our people are amazing. 
Come join us! (or if you know anyone let me know!)

I had our TikTok Shop OS mastermind call yesterday and I'm genuinely blown away. 👇 

The people in this group are operating at a level I don't see anywhere else. 🤩 

Yesterday someone broke down their entire process for going viral every single day on TikTok - the research, the system, the execution. 

It was one of the best breakdowns I've ever heard. The kind of stuff you don't find in a course.

I will legit amke an SOP just from hearing what she had to say.

That's what this group is. Real operators sharing what's actually working right now.

If you're serious about scaling on TikTok Shop in 2026, applications are open.

here's the link to apply (serious operators only) 

https://lnkd.in/gmBiHerZ

🔥 close to 100M of revenue driven on TikTok Shop and we’ve noticed one correlation that is staggering 

At scale 
32 views = $1 of on platform sales 
Plus halo 

Our mission is to drive 1b of social commerce revenue for brands in 2026
That’s a LOT of video views! 💰💰🙌🏻

Anyone else seeing a similar correlation?

Another day... another screenshot win for the team at SCC (this is why we're platinum at TT)

TikTok Shop
Still the most underrated  TOFchannel opportunity for brands in 2026 

Lower CAC on all other channels
Massive HALO 
WINNING

AMA

Every other TTS agency we talk in 2026 to is set up like this… 

1 strategist 
1 VA 
6-8 clients 
Job? 
Don’t get fired 
Results 💸
Cost 💰

Social Commerce Club 👇 

1 senior strategist 
1 associate TTS strategist (level of everyone else’s senior strat) 
1 full time sampler + creator recruiter 
1 community manager 
1 ops/compliance specialist 
1 media buyer 
1 designer 
Job? 
Scale massive accounts as a Tiktok shop platinum partner 🔥

Results? 
Huge scale for our brands 💰💰💰💰
Cost 💰💰💰

Just sayin…

Something interesting that we are starting to see on TikTok shop... It's something that you would only see or notice if you've been in the e-commerce space long enough! 👇👇

Here’s what I’m seeing!! 

At the beginning of scaling on TikTok shop, it seemed as though there was some sort of upper limit that you would hit where you couldn't scale beyond that. You could have super high return on ad spend, but essentially you wouldn't be able to scale beyond a certain point and start to get some of those really big economies of scale that you can see on Meta 

What I’m seeing now is the maturity of the channel and how fast this maturity is coming about! 

Way faster than meta. 

But... this all comes with one big thing that happens on every amazing platform, and that is competition! We have seen what that looks like!

The amount of enterprise brands that are coming to us at Social Commerce Club is staggering! 

Why? 

Because we have to be one of the only platinum partners in North America!

Big brands are flocking over because when you can spend $30,000 to $50,000 a day profitably with a massive halo on two other channels and top of all things get really, really interesting!

I'm very interested to see what the next year is going to look like in the space. 

Everything is changing so fast. What do you think?

Every person that has any sense of the brand and ecommerce market knows this one thing... 

TikTok shop and social commerce is the next HUGE TOF growth lever. 

It's the awareness machine. 
The content machine 
The revenue machine 
The R & D machine 
The customer feedback machine. 

EVERYTHING 

This is why brands need to look at it compeltely differently. 
It will take a paradigm shift from the classic "meta ads" world you've been used to. 

Questions?

Biggest mistake brands are making in 2026 on TikTok Shop

Tiktok Shop being in your marketplace division. 

Why? 
Marketplaces are inherintly demand capture 

TikTok Shop is demand gen. 
Treat it close to DTC + performance, not PPC 

The brands that get this perform WAYYYY better. 

It matters how you look at the channel. 

Paradigms matter.

How TikTok Shop feeds your other sales channels in 2026. 👇 (it's not what you think)
It's super obvious to me that TikTok Shop is going to be the absolute breakout channel of 2026 for a lot of brands! but...

At the end of the day, the brands that we work with care about one thing and one thing only: profitability on all channels combined and how they all work together.

I'm constantly surprised at the amount of new agencies that have popped up who don't realize the hundreds of millions of dollars that most brands are doing on other channels already, and that TikTok Shop is the ultimate top-of-funnel awareness channel that yes, can make money, but also drives to these other channels. 

I've talked constantly over the last couple of years about the halo effect that we see from TikTok shop over to Amazon. 

But let me tell you a little bit more. 

For us, it's not just the actual sales halo that we are seeing. 

What is even more interesting is the massive amount of content Halo that we are seeing. The biggest issue that we saw early on was that we needed to capture all of that content and be able to deploy it easily over on Meta. That's where our friends at Refunnel came in. T

hey were able to help us do that across the agency at scale, and it has definitely been a game changer. If you are not capturing that content and repurposing it over on Meta at scale, you are playing on hard mode this year! 

This is why I'm obsessed with the idea of unified commerce at Social Commerce Club, even when people have said, "Don't you guys just do TikTok shop...?" 

No! We came from the DTC world. I

t's what we know, and we believe that it all works incredibly well together. And then we also love to use Amazon as the final product capture in the whole omni-channel strategy! 

If you have no idea how all of this works together or how to launch, and your brand does over $10M a year on other channels, send me a DM or get ahold of my team at Social Commerce Club! 

This is what we think about every day.

We spend multiple 7 figures on GMV max every month!
Here's the GMV Max playbook as of today on TikTok Shop...

FIRST!!! Most brands are still overcomplicating it.

The ones winning usually do a few simple things really well

1. Keep the campaign structure simple

-Run one consolidated GMV Max campaign
-Don’t split budget across a bunch of “smart” campaigns
-TikTok rewards signal density... not account complexity

2. Narrow the product focus

-Give the campaign a clean lane
-Don’t dump in a random mix of SKUs
-A focused set like new arrivals gives the algorithm better inputs

3. Stop treating this like a media buying problem

-GMV Max is heavily influenced by content volume
-The more relevant creator content a product has, the easier it is for TikTok to scale it
-Better content inputs usually matter more than fancy account structure

4. Use target ROI as your main lever

-If performance is beating target, raise the ROI goal
-Force more efficiency before just spending harder
-This is one of the few real optimization levers that actually matters

5. Use the grace period strategically

-Don’t rush to force all the spend in the main campaign window
-If you can hit targets efficiently early, you create flexibility later
-The extra runway can help you scale cleaner

6. Build around content momentum

-TikTok will naturally push the products with the strongest content ecosystem
-More creators, more relevant videos, more proof
-That’s what gives the machine something to optimize against

That’s really the playbook right now!!!!

Less segmentation
Less manual control
Less account hacking

More focused inputs
More creator content
More trust in the algorithm

GMV Max is rewarding brands that simplify the structure... (and us at Social Commerce Club lol)

ABOVE ALL... stregthen your content engine - let the robot do the rest!

Most enterprise brands think TikTok Shop is a demand capture channel.
They're wrong!! (let me tell you the stats why)

After 2+ years all-in on TikTok Shop for enterprise brands, we've seen the opposite at Social Commerce Club

TikTok Shop is the ultimate demand gen engine!!

creating halo effects that boost sales everywhere else.

Key stats brands miss across our data sets

Viral campaigns drive 33%+ uplift in Amazon sales from halo alone (branded search spikes, traffic explodes, velocity up: no links needed). 

A TikTok Shop sale is worth 3x a DTC sale in ecosystem impact. 

62% of TikTok's incremental impact occurs on Amazon. 

According to a recent forbes study... coordinating with Amazon drives 40% YoY new customer growth (we have seen this at SCC)

What we've seen... 

TikTok Shop creates net-new demand via discovery, creators, virality: halo spills to Amazon, DTC, retail.

Don't treat it like an Amazon clone or any marketplace - it's much closer to DTC

“Our customers aren’t on TikTok.”
What they mean… 👇 

“I personally haven’t seen them there… so the app must be for kids.”

Reality?

You’re confusing your For You Page with reality.

TikTok isn’t “just kids.”

It’s literally an algorithm.

And the fastest-growing segments are adult buyers…

Here’s the data that makes the objection fall apart:
About 1 in 3 U.S. adults use TikTok.

Even more important…
40% of ages 30–49 are on it.
26% of ages 50–64 are on it.

Also…

The adult base grew FAST.

Now the part most founders miss:

You don’t “see” buyers on TikTok because buyers + adults are quiet.

About half of U.S. adult TikTok users have never posted a video…

They’re consumers, not creators.

They scroll.
And discovery > intent…

People buy what they didn’t wake up planning to buy.

Globally (TikTok ad planning data, Jan 2026), the ad audience breakdown looks like:

25–34: 35.3%
35–44: 16.4%
45–54: 9.2%
55+: 8.4%
25–44 is literally the “action” age band.

Even better…
An Edison Research survey (Oct 2025) found TikTok users 25–44 lead all age groups in taking action after ads:

54% seek more info
47% make purchases

And if you still think it’s “teen money”…

TikTok Shop did $15.82B in U.S. sales in 2025 (EMARKETER).

Your customers are on TikTok.
You just don’t see them yet.

Want our SCC systems but don't want to commit to a retainer? 

Ok... here you go! 
The TikTok Shop OS 
in 30 days we install our systems for scale. 
And you grow. (with or without us) 

Apply here  

https://lnkd.in/gp3Trhxv

When I owned my brands... I despised influencer marketing!! Why?? 
Because it always felt like gambling! (don't worry i found a fix) 👇 

One big creator deal. $10k. Hope it converts.

It doesn't. 10K wasted. 

I figured something out though... 

Here's the model that actually prints 💰

Product seeding → affiliate conversion → retainer investment

Here's how it works 👇

Seed 50-100 micro creators with your product
No upfront fees. Just product cost.

Track who actually converts!

You can do this all with an army of spreadsheets... 

or you can use SARAL - The Influencer OS's performance dashboard that shows you exactly who's driving sales, not just views 

Double down on the ones that work

Affiliate → retainer. Now you're paying ONLY for proven performance

Repeat. Scale. Compound.
Your best creators become long-term brand partners

This is exactly what I preach with TikTok Shop! 

Most brands skip steps 1 and 2.
They go straight to expensive retainers with unproven creators.

SARAL - The Influencer OS is the operational engine behind this whole system.

Inbox keeps your creator outreach organized
Performance dashboard shows you who's actually selling
SIA (their AI) manages relationships so nothing falls through the cracks

I've been advising the SARAL team and helping them build this for brands over the last year.

The brands printing with influencers right now(off TikTok Shop)?  They're running this playbook.

Go check them out at 

https://lnkd.in/gYXKru7y

#saralpartner

Hottest 2026 take in e-commerce (brand world) 👇👇


In the next five years we will be talking about social commerce, including Tiktok shop, but not limited to Tiktok shop, as the central driving factor for the top of funnel of almost every brand on the planet! 

I saw this coming two years ago, which is why I went all in. 

We are still so incredibly early.

Brands have no idea. 

The big enterprise brands that are coming to us still don't understand what it is doing in the funnel, the insane amount of halo that it is creating on every single other channel. 

The thing is... every other channel will start to understand how they can build it out for themselves.

You think that Meta is done testing this? Absolutely not! 

They are going to be losing a tonne of market share until they figure this out. 

You think Amazon won't figure something out? 

You think there won't be a new competitor in the space?

The problem is, you need to build the muscles now in your organisation. 

You need to not waste time working with agencies who don't get it. 

You cannot hand this off to your Meta agency; they just don't understand! 

This might be the most pivotal and important time for brands of the next five to ten years. 

Agree? Disagree?

Booked shoptalk 🙌🏻
But… 

Decided not get tix this year. 
All I want is to talk to interesting people this year (maybe a SAAS partner or two, maybe a cool brand or two) 

Who’s going and wants to hang with Parker Kump and I? 

Dm me 🙌🏻

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K all (brand owners) - I have an ask... (and a give) THIS IS CRAZY POST BE WARNED lol
When I was a multi-brand owner, I would get invited to talk at events and podcasts etc ALL THE TIME. 

I would argue as a large agency owner I HAVE WAYYYYYY more to talk about now and a way bigger view on commerce in general... (we are aiming to drive 1 billion in social commerce revenue this year after all) 

but... most events make agency owners pay BIG MONEY to keynote (also WTF??) 

So here's my thought... 

I am a REALLY good advisor 
had 5 of my advisory clients exit last year
every consumer brand I worked with grew at least 2X profitably. 

So... here's my thought
LET ME GET BACK IN THE BRAND GAME HAHAH 

I will advise your brand
Take a small amount of equity only if we grow 
Will be public facing and one of the faces of the brand online 

Here's what the brand needs to have 

1. Minimum 5 Mill sales (be at PMF) 
2. Wants to grow huge 
3. has appetite for Tiktok shop 
4. Wants someone to be the face 
5. No supplements sorry 

If that's you... DM me and we can chat

What do I get out of it? 

1. I get to speak at more events as a brand owner. 
2. I get to see growth of a brand again as an owner. 

I know... crazy idea right? 
But I know there is someone out there right now looking for help JUST LIKE THIS and we could create a win-win! 

DMs open!

With over six years at Praella, an ecommerce agency, our mission is clear: to merge the beauty and intelligence of commerce into powerful digital experiences. As CEO & Co-Founder, I've led our team to earn recognition such as Great Place to Work-Certified™ and a top spot on Fortune's Best Places to Work in Chicago. Our values resonate through our work, ensuring we consistently create and influence eloquent results and user experiences that align with our clients' visions. Our diverse perspectives foster a culture of innovation that has positioned us as a Shopify Plus Partner Agency.

Our work doesn't stop at launch; we continue engaging with ecommerce brands to enhance their digital presence proactively. As part of the leadership at the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, I apply my expertise in strategy, social media marketing, and new business development to judge at The Webby Awards, furthering the field's standards for excellence. This role complements my commitment at Praella, where we leverage data to craft award-winning user experiences that drive success for our clients.

Amer Grozdanic

I had the opportunity to chat with Kurt Elster in person on his podcast last week. What a great time. We covered so, so, so much...

Kurt and I do not live too far from each other, and this was the first time we connected and had an in-depth chat about ecommerce, Shopify, and everything in the ecosystem.

He told me he cuts/edits the recordings down to 20 minutes, but this ended up being 55 minutes. 

I hope we can get to do it again in the future.

https://lnkd.in/gC69YWqp

Co-Founder and CEO @ Praella, Co-Host of @ ASOM Pod, Ecommerce and SaaS Investor, and Co-Founder of HulkApps (Exited)

What would you do if you were starting a Shopify store today?

Kurt Elster and I chatted about it on his podcast. What are your thoughts?

Shopify Expert since '12, Host: The Unofficial Shopify Podcast (2M+ plays)

"If you were starting a brand new Shopify store, what would you do differently?" 

This segment from last week's episode of The Unofficial Shopify Podcast with Amer Grozdanic was a listener favorite💚

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