I have had these ads coming across my TikTok for a few weeks now:
This piqued my curiosity, so I decided to investigate the website. In the past 5 days, they have processed 430 orders.
Average Daily Number of Order: 86
Average Order Value: $30
Average Daily Revenue: $2,580
Estimated Daily Traffic: 2500 users
Estimated Conversion Rate: 3.44%
Estimated Daily Ad Spend: $400 – $500
Cost of Goods Sold:
This is a dropship item sold on Alibaba (see here). It looks like you can dropship a single unit for around $2-$3 per unit plus $12 for shipping. I round up to $15 all in to get the product to the customer.
Based on all this information here is what I am able to piece together for a quick monthly P&L for this operation:
Now you’ll note I put Contribution Margin at the bottom rather than Net Profit. I do not know what other operating costs this business may have. They may choose to have an office or choose to have staff. However, this operation could be run by a single person from your home and you do not need those extra operational costs.
Advertising Costs:
I estimate that this company is spending about $400-$500 a day in ad spend. My best guess is that the majority of this money has been spent on TikTok. I only see one Facebook ad on their account (which is a video of this being used as a cat toy). I only see two ads on Google and the search volume is fairly low for “Floppy Fish” (I do not know what other terms people would search to find this product nor do I see them bidding on other keywords):
Average monthly searches for “floppy fish” is 8,100 and there was a peak around the holidays (December 2020). Here is their most used Google ad:
I showed you 3 of their TikTok ads above. In total I have seen 7 different ads from them on TikTok in the past 10 days. On average each ad is being seen 134,000 times. Giving them an average click-thru rate of 2%, these ads have driven about 19,000 people to their website over the 10 day period (an average of about 1,900 users per day). From my own experience and research, the average cost-per-click on TikTok is about $0.20.
This means on average this company is spending about $380 a day to drive those 1,900 users.
I estimate they spend another $100 a day or so between Facebook and Google.
Software:
This operation is built off of 3 main pieces of software. Shopify ($30/month) as their ecommerce platform, Judge.me ($15/month) for reviews, and Zendesk ($49/month) for customer service support and ticketing. There are probably a few other pieces of software that they pay for to help them manage the business (email, accounting software, etc). In total, I estimate they spend about $500/month on software.
Social:
Floppy Fish has next no social presence.
Facebook – 651 people like the page (have not updated since January 2021)
Instagram – 3,074 Followers (have not updated since January 2021)
TikTok – 6 followers (1 organic video)
This business is completely driven off of paid ads.
History of FloppyFish.com
It appears they once were http://www.officialfloppyfishy.com but upgraded to http://www.FloppyFishy.com recently. They also focused on selling this as a cat toy up until a month or so ago and made the pivot to have their entire website feature this product as a dog toy (I cannot find any creative on their website selling this as a cat toy anymore). All of their TikTok videos focus on this being for Dogs. This pivot most likely allowed them to stand out against the competition like this company that sells the exact same product: https://floppyfishcattoys.com/
Can you replicate this business?
I do not see any reason why you can’t have a competing website up within 3-5 days. Anyone can order this product from Alibaba. Anyone can spin up a Shopify store. The videos they made for TikTok ads are simple videos from an iPhone recording a dog playing with the toy. It really comes down to can you create unique/original content with this product and sell it to an audience (don’t just use the assets given by the manufacturer).
If you give it a try, let me know how it goes!
