Lets jump straight into it: The £1 Sunscreen Mistake That Made £1M+ Monthly (And What It Teaches Us About 2025)
So here’s a story that’ll make every eCommerce manager’s stomach drop: you accidentally price your sunscreen at £1 instead of £10. A thousand units sell in minutes. Your phone’s blowing up. What do you do?
If you’re The INKEY List, you turn that panic moment into a masterclass. They’re now pulling over £1 million monthly through TikTok Shop, with 21% of that coming purely from live sessions. That accidental £1 sunscreen? Just another data point in figuring out what actually works.
This is edition 10, and honestly, the gap between brands crushing it right now and brands struggling isn’t what you think. It’s not budget. It’s not tools. It’s whether you’re willing to test things that feel uncomfortable and learn faster than your competitors.
Let’s dig in.
Sometimes You Need to Blow It All Up
Right, uncomfortable truth time. If your organic traffic’s been sliding downhill for a year despite everything you’ve tried, you don’t have an SEO problem. You’ve got a foundation problem.
There’s this idea floating around the industry lately that’s making a lot of people nervous: some websites are better off starting from scratch than continuing to optimise what’s already there. Sounds dramatic, doesn’t it? But think about it properly for a second.
Your site architecture was built when? 2019? 2020? Back when people searched differently, bought differently, behaved differently online. You’ve been patching and optimising ever since, but the bones of the thing are fundamentally misaligned with how customers actually shop today.
Site speed that won’t budge no matter how many times you compress those product images. Navigation that made perfect sense three years ago but now just confuses people. Content written to tick keyword boxes instead of answering the actual questions your customers are asking at 11pm when they’re trying to decide whether to buy from you.
I know what you’re thinking: “But we’ve invested so much already.” Fair. But here’s the question that matters more – is continuing to invest in something fundamentally broken actually the sensible business decision? Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is admit the foundation needs rebuilding and just get on with it.
Google’s AI Doesn’t Care About Your Keywords Anymore
While everyone’s been debating the perfect keyword density, Google went ahead and taught its AI to actually understand what people mean, not just what they type.
The Gemini 3 stuff rolling into AI Mode isn’t just another update you can ignore. It’s completely changed how product discovery works. The AI’s now handling queries with proper context understanding, picking up on nuance, getting what people actually want rather than just matching words.
What does this mean for your products? Well, all those carefully keyword-optimised descriptions you spent weeks perfecting? They’re starting to look a bit robotic, aren’t they? Because that’s not how humans talk, and Google’s AI is now smart enough to know the difference.
Your customers aren’t typing “best waterproof running shoes UK size 10” anymore. They’re asking things like “I need trainers that won’t get ruined in Manchester rain for my morning commute.” And Google’s AI is figuring out what that actually means.
The fix isn’t complicated, it’s just different from what we’ve all been doing. Write like a human talking to another human. Answer the real questions. Stop trying to game an algorithm that’s now too sophisticated to be gamed.
TikTok Shop Is Printing Money (If You’re Willing to Look Daft on Camera)
Look, I get it. The idea of doing live shopping sessions on TikTok probably makes you cringe a bit. Standing there talking about moisturiser for 30 minutes while strangers watch? Sounds absolutely mad.
But The INKEY List is doing exactly that and it’s generating 21% of their TikTok Shop revenue. Over £1 million monthly through the channel. And it started with them making mistakes, lots of them.
That £1 sunscreen disaster? They learned from it. Hit store caps during busy lives? Figured it out. Products selling out mid-session? Found workarounds. Every stumble became data, every problem became a lesson.
Here’s what they’re doing that most brands aren’t: they script their lives minute by minute, but they’re not rigid about it. They watch the engagement data in real time and pivot when something’s landing or not working. They’ve figured out bundling properly, not just throwing random products together but actually thinking about what introduces customers to their range whilst making logical sense.
The barrier here isn’t budget or having some influencer personality. It’s being willing to look a bit daft, show up consistently, and treat the whole thing as a proper sales channel instead of a marketing experiment you half commit to.
Google Ads Just Got More Useful (Finally)
Right, quick one on Google Ads because this actually matters more than it sounds. They’ve added proper custom view options for the overview tabs, which means you can finally build dashboards that show you what you actually care about instead of drowning in metrics that don’t move your business forward.
Smart move? Bin off all the vanity metrics you’re tracking because they “seem important” and build views around what actually drives decisions. Which product categories are really performing? Where are your budgets working hardest? What audience segments are converting versus just clicking?
Takes about 20 minutes to set up properly and saves hours of scrolling through irrelevant data every week. Just do it.
What You Should Actually Do This Week
Stop reading and pull up your organic traffic for the past 12 months. Properly look at it. If it’s been declining despite your SEO work, have an honest conversation about whether rebuilding might actually be faster and cheaper than continuing to optimise something that’s fundamentally not working. I know it’s uncomfortable. Do it anyway.
Pick your three bestselling products and rewrite the descriptions like you’re explaining them to a mate over coffee. Real language, actual answers to real questions, zero keyword stuffing. Test it and see what happens.
Go live on TikTok or Instagram once this week. Thirty minutes. One product. Don’t wait until you feel ready because you never will. Watch what gets engagement, note when people ask questions, see when they drop off. It’s just research.
Clean up your Google Ads dashboard. Remove everything you don’t actually use to make decisions. Build custom views around the three KPIs that genuinely matter to your business.
Create three product bundles that actually make sense together. Not random combinations, but things that logically go together and help customers discover more of your range. Test them everywhere.
Here’s the Thing
Ten editions in and the pattern’s becoming pretty clear. The brands winning right now aren’t the ones with massive budgets or secret strategies. They’re the ones willing to test things that feel risky, learn quickly from what doesn’t work, and move faster than everyone else.
AI search is already here and it’s already changing how your customers find products. Social commerce isn’t some future trend, it’s happening right now and printing money for brands brave enough to show up. Your website might need rebuilding from scratch and that’s actually okay.
The gap isn’t knowledge. Everyone’s got access to the same information, the same tools, the same platforms. The gap is courage and speed. That’s it.
So what are you actually going to do differently this week?
Ready for more? We’ve got 200+ podcast episodes waiting for you over at the eComOne Podcast.
