How to Grow on Amazon & TikTok Shop | Interview with Sergio Castillo from Sellico

What does it take to win on Amazon and TikTok Shop in 2026?

In this interview, we sit down with Sergio Castillo, VP of E-Commerce Growth & Operations at Sellico, to discuss the latest marketplace trends, Amazon SEO and listing optimization, TikTok Shop growth strategies, creator and affiliate marketing, and the KPIs sellers should focus on to drive sustainable growth.

Whether you're an Amazon seller, TikTok Shop brand, or growing e-commerce business, this conversation is packed with insights to help you increase visibility, drive conversions, and grow your sales.

🔗 Learn more about Sellico: https://sellico.com/ @UseSellico 
🔗 Connect with Sergio Castillo: sergio@sellico.com

🔗 Learn more about GetReviews.ai: https://getreviews.ai

Transcript

(0:00 - 0:22)

Hi everyone, this is Joy from the GetReviews team. Joining me today is Sergio, VP of Ecommerce Growth and Operations at Sellico. Sellico works with sellers on platforms like Amazon, TikTok Shop, Shopify, and Walmart, helping them launch products, improve organic rankings, and build customer trust through compliant product launch and review campaigns.

(0:23 - 0:38)

With Sergio's perspective on both growth and operations, we're really excited to dive into what it takes to stand out and succeed in today's competitive e-commerce landscape. So Sergio, welcome, thank you so much for joining me. Of course, Joy.

(0:38 - 1:00)

I know you gave an introduction to yourself, you said a brief intro about yourself, but I wanted to see if you had anything, if you wanted to just say hi to our audience. So yeah, thank you for the opportunity, hello to the audience. I think you summarized my role and my job pretty well, so I'll let that one stand as my intro.

(1:01 - 1:15)

Awesome. And we can go into the questions right away. And the first question I wanted to ask is, it's November right now, we're heading towards the end of 2026, Black Friday is coming up soon as well.

(1:16 - 2:03)

But I'd love to just take the time to reflect on what had occurred this year. Did you notice any distinct trends or changes in the Amazon or TikTok shop, or just in general, any of the marketplaces? And would that be the marketplace itself, or maybe any changes in consumer behavior, or just any changes that you're seeing? Gosh, 2026, very busy year in the sense of developments coming out of both Amazon and TikTok. I think earlier this year, it became pretty obvious that Amazon and TikTok were going to be working closer together and not exactly in competition with one another.

(2:03 - 2:16)

So what do I mean by that? So MCF now services TikTok. TikTok, so FBT, Fulfilled by TikTok now services Amazon as well. So their fulfillment networks are bi-directional, which is interesting.

(2:17 - 2:47)

Additionally, as TikTok sellers struggle for profitability, a strategy that a lot of agencies have been adopting is trading TikTok as top of funnel. You get your content, you get your creators, you get brand recognition, but you convert on Amazon, or you convert with Meta, you convert off platform. So you generate your content on TikTok, where you go and see your conversions, see your sales on Amazon, which works out pretty well, if you set it up properly.

(2:48 - 3:11)

So that's something, just those two quick points are how a lot of people were assuming, oh, they're going to be in direct competition with one another. But in reality, what we're seeing on the ground is they're actually generating a lot of partnerships and collaboration. If I were to silo them individually, I would say Amazon is still Amazon.

(3:11 - 3:34)

It's a big juggernaut that's going to change very, very slowly. But an interesting wrinkle that we're picking up on out of TikTok is as they hire more Amazon execs, as they hire more Amazon headcount, or ex-Amazon headcount, the more they're becoming like Amazon. So SEO is coming to TikTok, whether we like it or not, which might be nice for sellers.

(3:35 - 3:52)

You don't have to sell via the 15% or 20% commission video. Now you can optimize for, hey, creatine supplements, right? So you don't have to pay Nancy from Tennessee her 20%, just because she made a 15 second video. It's, hey, I can get traffic through search.

(3:53 - 4:09)

So that was a very long winded answer. But that's what we've seen this year at least. Yeah, you make a really interesting point on how some of these marketplaces, yes, they can be competitors, but they're also building a lot of partnerships.

(4:10 - 4:37)

I think one thing that really surprised me is I attended the Prosper Show that I attended back in April, right, in Vegas. And I know Prosper Show tend to be usually focused just on Amazon marketplace. But what surprised me was that, yes, there was a very big Amazon presence, but a lot of sellers for now expanding into, let's say, I think the second most common marketplace was actually Walmart that they were looking into.

(4:38 - 4:48)

And Walmart was a huge sponsor for the Prosper Show. But also seeing like, I don't remember TikTok being there. No, TikTok was there.

(4:48 - 4:52)

TikTok had the live booth. They had that one live booth up front. Yeah.

(4:52 - 5:05)

Yeah, they did have a booth. But I'm also seeing some other market, surprisingly other marketplaces like Coupang, which is like Korea's equivalent to Amazon. And I was shocked when I saw them there.

(5:05 - 5:19)

But I noticed that they're trying to get some sellers from, trying to get Amazon sellers and trying to get them to their marketplace, which is, I think, very nice to see. It gives an opportunity for sellers to expand as well. Exposes more marketplace, right? More potential shoppers.

(5:20 - 5:27)

Yeah, absolutely. And I think in terms of SEO, this is something you mentioned. And this is a big question.

(5:27 - 5:44)

And I know there's many factors that are involved. But there's been a lot of changes this year, especially with, I think, the more formalization of, let's say, Amazon Rufus. You can really see Amazon pushing that on the mobile and both desktop experience for shoppers.

(5:44 - 6:35)

But would you say there's anything distinct or maybe any changes when it comes to approaching Amazon's keyword research, listing optimization, just to make sure sellers are improving their organic search rankings and, of course, driving sales at the end of the day? Yeah, so something that we like to harp on over here at Silico is that Rufus at the end of the day still needs you to answer questions in practical, simple language. So we see this a lot in supplements, right? Or shopper sellers, excuse me, like to use whatever the chemical name is, because that's what's going to index. Or they're going to use some huge long tail that is supposed to signal, hey, this helps with XYZ.

(6:36 - 7:22)

Rufus might understand what that means down the line. But at the end of the day, Nancy is going to say, products that help me with, I don't know, with skin irritation, products that help me with my under eye bags, products that help me with bloating, whatever it may be, at the end of the day, your product listing needs to be easily scrapeable to easily answer those very natural questions. Right? We can put an A-B test of, hey, let's put all of our big sciencey, important sounding words here in our product description, or let's just answer what that ingredient is supposed to be fixing or helping or preventing, right? I don't bet a lot, but I'm going to bet the R-B test is probably going to do a lot better on Rufus.

(7:22 - 7:43)

At the end of the day, for keyword research, it's still ranking against a gap. Right? So what do I mean by that? You're trying to bridge the gap of what you're relevant for, for what you're actually ranking for. Right? So that's where the volume to difficulty to rank question becomes important.

(7:43 - 7:54)

And that's kind of where Salchow helps you. Right? So you're going to have, you just launched your product. You're going to have four or five keywords that you know you want to do well on or that your research tells you you want to do well on.

(7:54 - 8:05)

But at the end of the day, products or keywords, let's say three and four are on page nine and 12. Right there, back there. Right? Good luck PPCing your way to page three with that.

(8:05 - 8:14)

It's going to be very extensive and very long. So that's where Salchow can come in and say, hey, let's shorten that timeframe. We'll be exponentially cheaper while you rank yourself up.

(8:15 - 8:39)

And then you pair that with the reviews from GetReviews.ai. And hey, what would have taken you six months to even generate some traction? And now you can do it in a month and a half to three. Right? So that's at the end of the day, both parties here, GetReviews and Salchow, we're facilitating or the shopper, the seller is buying time. Right? The brand owner is buying time.

(8:39 - 8:45)

They can do this slowly and organically. Take half a year or we can help. Yeah.

(8:45 - 8:56)

That's what we're doing at the end of the day. Absolutely. And I know from SEO is definitely listing optimization is definitely your expertise, and reviews is our expertise.

(8:56 - 9:19)

But one of the big things I noticed, and I'm curious if you noticed that there was any impact on SEO is that I know it was introduced maybe a few months ago, but now product titles, there's a cap on how many characters it could be. I know a lot of products have to be, their product names have to be shortened. You know, it needs to have sellers.

(9:19 - 10:08)

And, you know, when I look at these product names, it includes a lot of different keywords, especially when I see it from like a lot of personal care sellers or supplements, you know, they're really just trying to put in as much keywords as they can in their product titles. Now that Amazon kind of implemented a rule where you have to shorten it, I'm curious, did you notice any impact on, you know, the listing optimizations or did Zulish just have to get smarter in really optimizing what keywords they want to include in their product titles? So our opinion on this is going to be a little bit different. So we jumped on the bandwagon of, you want to have your top two keywords in your title, you want to have your top three keywords in your title, et cetera, et cetera.

(10:08 - 10:37)

But it makes sense that as Amazon rolls out Rufus, tries to become more streamlined, tries to make the shopper experience more efficient, we'll call it. Tom from Tennessee isn't searching your long tail with three, four or five year keywords trying to look for that specific product. He's looking for a fix, right? So it makes sense that Amazon is trying to make Rufus's life more easy, the shopper's life more easy.

(10:37 - 11:13)

And the way to do that most quickly is to ask the seller or the brand to be more efficient with their titles, right? So our opinion is going to be pick your top keyword, the one you know you want to rank on. Yeah, keep that in your title. But at the end of the day, you're trying to index for what the product actually is and have one keyword that you know is going to be able to be easily findable, right? So probably put your largest search term by volume in your title and everything else say for your product description.

(11:16 - 11:54)

What word am I looking for here? The fallback plan is to shove all of those keywords in your product description because now we know Rufus is scraping both, right? We previously used to say, hey, then the interest nodes and the product indexing is going to be mainly based off of the title because that's what the computing power can do well, right? Now with AI in the back end, it's scraping your entire listing, right? It's scraping your images. It's going to start parsing the words in your images. So we don't really have a need to put a two sentence title.

(11:55 - 12:08)

Put a small blurb, keep it efficient, keep it to the point and put everything else in your product description. That's what we've been doing. So that's what I'm going to say what we've been seeing because that's what we've been recommending.

(12:09 - 12:32)

And it's on par. I don't have the data to say it's better than at this moment, but it's on par with what we've been doing for the past seven years at this point, right? Yeah, I think maybe it's still too new to be able to see concrete results when it comes to implementing all of those. But I know at least with, you know, whether it's Rufus or just anything in general, it does take some time to see results.

(12:33 - 12:44)

So especially I think when it comes to scraping any data. But okay, yeah, that makes sense. And, you know, at least for GetReviews, we were recently added as an app in the TikTok shop.

(12:44 - 12:55)

Awesome. We can automatically now syndicate reviews into TikTok shops. So this is now kind of a new marketplace we're also, you know, diving into.

(12:55 - 13:05)

We're seeing a lot of sellers now. You know, we primarily work with Amazon sellers, and we also noticed that they're now expanding into TikTok shop. You know, Walmart, TikTok shop.

(13:05 - 13:12)

Those are some of the popular marketplaces. But, you know, very similar to the previous question I asked. It's a big one.

(13:12 - 13:37)

But, you know, when it comes to TikTok shop, you know, would you say that there's any kind of general tips you can share in terms of how sellers can optimize their product listings, maybe like hashtags, improve search, just because I think TikTok shop is still in its very early stages. And there's still a lot of opportunities for, I think, sellers to join and maybe get in early. Yeah.

(13:39 - 13:43)

I hate hashtags. Hashtags are very overrated. I'll be honest with you.

(13:43 - 14:24)

I think hashtags are very overrated. Um, something that is useful, at least going in, assuming that this audience is mainly Amazon focused, is going to be that all of the hard work and labor and team building and system building that you had to generate to do well on Amazon is going to be even more annoying on TikTok. Because not only are you accounting for the end consumer, the shopper, but you also have to account for the affiliate who's going to be making your content, right? So now you have two pools of people that you need to keep happy or satisfied and both of them are going to cost you money.

(14:25 - 15:22)

Okay, so on the affiliate side, you need to have enough inventory to send out hundreds of samples a month, right? So that automatically pushes us to the idea of, hey, do only cheap products do well on TikTok? My immediate answer is going to be no. I've seen and we've helped launch plenty of brands selling, you know, three-figure, if not four-figure products, right? $100 or $1,000, et cetera. The catch there is that you need to have a tight, firm control of your cogs and you need to be very disciplined with your affiliate sampling, okay? Because if you let the TikTok affiliate system just ask and ask and ask for samples, you're going to send out hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of samples a month, okay? So that's fine for a beauty brand whose cogs are like maybe $0.50, right? They can afford that.

(15:22 - 15:28)

They can send out $2,000 a month and no one's going to blink an eye. But you know, I don't know. I don't know, gosh.

(15:30 - 15:49)

Electronics, right? Where your cogs might be $15, $20, like those LED face masks that are super popular. That's going to be harder to do. So my note of advice here is be cognizant of the very large lift that TikTok is going to require.

(15:49 - 15:55)

It's its own beast all by itself. It's not just, hey, I'm going to open the store. I'm going to post some videos and it's going to sell.

(15:55 - 16:09)

It's not, okay? You need to build the system behind it. You need to build, have the right software in place. Um, do not rely on the TikTok seller dashboard to do all the work.

(16:09 - 16:16)

It is so clunky, so annoying. Opens a new tab for everything you click. It is terrible UI.

(16:17 - 16:30)

But there's lots of, you know, we'll call them SaaS products. I don't know if you can really call them SaaS anymore as AI is just eating everything up. There's a bunch of SaaS products out there that can help with that, right? They act as a CRM.

(16:30 - 16:42)

They follow up with your reviews. You know, check FBT and make sure that TikTok isn't keeping all this money from you. There's plenty of tools out there that can make your life easier.

(16:42 - 16:49)

And I would recommend leaning on those tools. Don't try to do it yourself, unfortunately. That sounds self-aggrandizing, but it's really not.

(16:49 - 16:54)

I promise you life will be better if you offload some of that work. Yeah. Wow.

(16:55 - 17:09)

And I know you mentioned in terms of it seems like having an affiliate strategy is extremely important, at least for TikTok shop. And that kind of just reminds me of at least maybe like the Vine program for Amazon sales as well. It helps you get those initial 30 reviews.

(17:10 - 17:21)

You know, you can kind of give out samples or you can give out your product for free. And then you'll get, not guaranteed, but you're going to be able to receive 30 reviews. So kind of reminds me of that.

(17:22 - 17:37)

But it seems like for TikTok shop, the affiliate program is at a much bigger scale, it seems like. And you need it in order to get some sales in the beginning. You sell on TikTok via affiliates.

(17:38 - 17:57)

Your product is pushed on the For You page when an affiliate has made it. You get more functionality on your dashboard when your affiliate GMV is higher. You get more, basically the entire system is structured so that there is a brand owner with a lot of product.

(17:58 - 18:14)

And there's an audience who happens to want to be a creator as well. And then there's TikTok in the middle. TikTok is trying to facilitate, hey, not only can you have interest media, have social media, have Amazon on one platform, but I'm going to facilitate all of this.

(18:15 - 18:38)

So brand owner, not that I'm going to force you to do it, but I'm going to highly, highly incentivize you to work with the affiliates and not just post content from your own account. So think of it as that relationship triangle. Amazon TikTok is going to, I hate to use the word force, you will not get momentum without using affiliates.

(18:38 - 18:47)

That's the best way to structure it. You can't post your way out from zero activity to being a functioning store. You need affiliates.

(18:47 - 18:59)

Right. Yeah. Do you notice any sellers coming to you or at least new TikTok shop sellers coming to you saying, Sergio, I want to go viral on TikTok.

(19:00 - 19:51)

Just because, you know, the topic of virality is very, very big on, I think, social media or even like especially TikTok shop. Do you have any, for example, specific or interesting goals that maybe sellers have set that they want to achieve or anything maybe interesting or maybe interesting strategies that you've implemented for your TikTok shop sellers that have been done extremely well, maybe have done poorly? So in terms of strategies for virality, the quick caveat on that is going to be that TikTok is a lottery, right? You could think that this is the worst, worst edited, worst scripted, worst lighting video of all time. And for no reason, it's going to get 700,000 views, right? So don't hate on bad content.

(19:51 - 20:06)

You have no idea what the algorithm is going to like that day. So think of every single video made as a lottery ticket. And one of those may just go viral, right? Now, viral means different things for different people, right? Viral for a new shop may mean 15,000 views.

(20:06 - 20:30)

Viral for an established shop might mean 200,000 views. Viral for, gosh, I don't know, AG1 means 5 million views, right? So everybody has their own definition of it. But something that we did pioneer with some agencies at the beginning of the year is what we call flooding the algorithm, right? So you as the brand owner are going to send out your samples.

(20:30 - 21:05)

You're going to have your content brief, but you're going to tell the affiliate, hey, affiliate, you are not going to post this until November 15th at noon, right? Or November 15th at 7pm, okay? And then all of a sudden, the algorithm has 400 videos all tagging back to the same SKU at one time, right? So at the SKU level, it's saying, hey, there are thousands of views happening right now. I should keep amplifying it. While at the minute video level, Nancy, Tom and Jenny may see 300, 400 and maybe 250 views on their individual videos.

(21:06 - 21:32)

But once you aggregate it across all of your affiliates, across all of their videos, if the algorithm is anchoring on that SKU, it's going to say, hey, there's lots of views. I should find more content associated with this SKU and push it. So it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy in the sense of if you were to post, if everybody was supposed, you know, on November 3rd, November 7th, November 8th, November 13th, the algorithm is going to say, hey, this is a standalone video.

(21:32 - 21:35)

It got 300 views. I'm going to kill it. Nobody really wanted to see it.

(21:36 - 22:11)

But because you're syncing everybody, when it goes and references that SKU, it's going to say, hey, this thing has thousands of views and it's increasing. I should push any associated video more, right? So half the agencies we work with adopt that strategy. I'm not going to say we can take 100% credit for it, but we came up with the idea of syncing those post dates just to see if it would trick the algorithm into doing it.

And luckily it did. So that's what people have been doing for 10 months at this point. So that's a fun little strategy.

(22:11 - 22:17)

Yeah. Very smart, I would say. And definitely I think would align well with TikTok shop for sure.

(22:17 - 22:55)

Yeah, 100%. Now, Sergio, I know we're very close to time, but I really want to see if you can just maybe share some final insights of where people can find you, what maybe, you know, if any sellers are interested in learning more about Silico services, you know, where they can find you, who they can contact maybe. Yeah.

So they could just, so if they're watching this recording, they could just email me at Sergio at sellico.com. Sergio S-E-R-G-I-O at Sellico. It's kind of my little name tag right here. Sergio at sellico.com. You can just email me.

(22:55 - 24:01)

But if you want some more information, sellico.com is going to list out all of our services across all platforms. As you mentioned earlier, it's going to be Amazon, TikTok, Walmart, Target, Costco, Sephora, Chewy, Petco, Home Depot, Lowe's, Best Buy, et cetera, et cetera. And the nice part about us is I think we're very competitively priced.

And that's just because we're so old, meaning we're seven years old. Our shopper community is just so big that we can gobble up any size campaign people need to run. And we know that we're going to be terms of service compliant, right? We have SLA signed with all of our platforms that we operate on.

So with that in mind, it's not like some black hat, gray hat kind of situation. We can walk through compliance if they want to walk through compliance. That's everybody's biggest worry.

But we can operate on all these platforms. We can launch you on all these platforms. So between the help over at GetReviews and the help of Silico, I don't see why people can't shorten a launch sequence from four to five months down to a month, month and a half, maybe two.

(24:01 - 25:15)

Right? So time is money at the end of the day. Absolutely. And I think with the new year coming up, one thing I noticed that a lot of people tend to set up New Year's resolutions for themselves.

And one of them is usually starting their own business. And I think a lot of people tend to start an Amazon business, just because I think I always recommend it. So it'll be interesting to see for any sellers that are interested in launching their own brand, how they can maybe make good use of Silicos and GetReviews offerings.

Yeah. Awesome. Perfect.

Well, we'll make sure that we include all of the important information in the description box below. And I think when it comes to, if there's any questions or comments, the watchers are more than welcome to leave it in the comment box, and then we'll try to maybe share it with you and see what we can do. But again, Suresh, thank you so much for joining me.

This was, I think, really insightful and really helpful. And TikTok shop and Amazon is still going to be two marketplaces that people are going to be looking out for, especially in 2027, for sure. 100%.

Thank you again, Joy. Have a great day. Thank you so much.

Bye. Of course.

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