Social media platforms have been debranding companies for decades. Where did you find that great sweater? Facebook. Facebook does not sell sweaters, yet they are taking credit for the sale and the sweater. It is a mystery why so many of you believed them when they lured you onto their platform and collected data including not only your customer list, but also your marketing strategy and all of your partners and suppliers. You don’t really own the channel. You just setup a user name on a platform that takes ownership of all the content you create and then tricks you into branding their platform, not your business.
TikTok is running TV and radio commercials trying to convince young people to start a business on TikTok.
Spoiler alert: If you have a good idea and you are selling product TikTok, they collect all the info they need about everything you are doing to recreate whatever it is you are selling and then steal it right out from underneath you without you ever knowing.
The greatest trick eBay ever pulled was convincing people to set up an eBay store. Instead of buying your own domain name and marketing your website, you paid hosting fees to eBay and paid to promote their site. The same thing is happening with disgustingly oversaturated Amazon where there is so much crap that buying anything new (excluding reorders) is an unpleasant experience. Shopify starts you off at $1 per month for three months. By the time you get to the 6th month it is $39/month. It is at that point you realize that you may also have to pay subscription fees with print-on-demand companies and other ‘apps’ to get discounts on their horribly overpriced products because using their ‘apps’ through Shopify gets Shopify a referral commission on products you sell. Starting with Shopify at $1 can easily wind up costing $100 per month by the time you add up all of the undisclosed fees. Shopify print on demand partners charge too much and turnaround is too slow to operate a profitable business in an oversaturated market. You could set up a website at Wordpress for $100 per year and do the same thing over there. But don’t.
If you examine the structure of the way all of these platforms work, everything funnels back to China when it comes to raw materials manufacturers. Data about your business has been collected and analyzed by big tech platforms in the same way they trained AI generators on your text and images. There is even talk of print-on-demand companies in the U.S. stealing high volume selling products out from underneath their customers (businesses) and selling direct to customers at a discount. American stuff is very popular in China. They take your face, your videos and your product and put through an AI trainer and recreate you on the Chinese version of TikTok and sell your stuff, and you, directly to their own people. Don’t believe the ‘success’ stories you are hearing about young entrepreneurs making it big with TikTok channels. It is not happening.
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