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US-based affiliate marketing platform ShopMy has launched its first retail platform on Wednesday that allows shoppers to buy directly from shopfronts compiling their favourite creators’ recommendations.
The new shopping platform will centre around what ShopMy calls “circles”, a feature that the startup says uses AI to personalise shoppers’ taste profiles, based on the creators they follow. This AI-powered tool also begins to recommend other creators that users may like, once they’ve wishlisted at least 25 items, as well as suggesting other creators that recommended the same product, within product detail pages themselves. As with the typical affiliate model, users will be sent to the brand or retailer’s site to complete a purchase via the ShopMy platform; brands set the commission rates for products, which is then split among the creators in a “circle” who recommended each product.
The idea is that users will be able to shop multiple creators’ recommendations at one time, says ShopMy CEO and co-founder Harry Rein. “So instead of just browsing a creator’s Instagram or Substack and saving a screenshot, let’s say I have a trusted circle of 20 people whose tastes I really love. Now, I can blend those into a single unified storefront — my own personal boutique,” says Rein.
ShopMy has built a creator network of around 175,000 creators — including Molly Baz, Nara Smith and Sofia Richie Grainge — and over 1,000 brand partners — including Dôen, Prada and Khaite — since it was founded in 2020. Both ShopMy and its main competitor, LTK, which was launched in 2011, are benefitting from influencers’ ability to push product. The global creator economy is projected to grow to $500 billion by 2027, according to Goldman Sachs. Brand interest in the marketing vertical is also growing, as 73 per cent of marketers plan to invest more in ambassador programmes over the next year, per influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy.
These affiliate platforms have built their business models around acting as a bridge between influencers, social content and commerce. Now, ShopMy is betting on its new consumer platform to close the loop between brands, creators and the end consumer — what Rein refers to as the “third stakeholder” in its B2B offering, rather than a pivot to direct-to-consumer (DTC).
It’s a potentially lucrative opportunity, and one that social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram have been vying for themselves. But it’s proven difficult for these platforms to live up to the social commerce promise — Instagram ditched its dedicated shopping tab in 2023, in a bid to “simplify” and “focus” the platform better. TikTok Shop has seen more success, but is so far mostly associated with lower priced, impulse items.
ShopMy co-founder Tiffany Lopinsky says the platform moves around $80 million per month in product through its creator affiliate links. Its “opportunities” tool, which it launched last summer to enable brands to automate paid organic mentions from influencers on their channels, reaps brands an average 5.5x ROI (return on investment) on every creator deal, Lopinsky adds.
While creators’ commissions could be cut thanks to the new split model, ShopMy is pitching its shopping platform to brands and creators as additional exposure and sales conversion through time — consumers can wishlist products and buy later, which the startup says helps creators capture commission that they’d otherwise lose if they weren’t the last person to post the link.
“In some ways, ShopMy has always been invisible,” Lopinsky says. “So now we’re rolling out a brand-new way to discover products from your favourite tastemakers’ recommendations, without having to sift through so much content.”
Verified product reviews are also integrated into the new platform, following ShopMy’s acquisition of brand review platform Thingtesting earlier this year. ShopMy’s shopping platform will initially be web-only, but Rein says it plans to roll out an app by early 2026.
Curation over algorithm
ShopMy isn’t the first affiliate platform to launch a consumer shopping platform. LTK introduced its consumer-facing shopping app in 2017, before relaunching it this year to focus on video-first content, to try and keep pace with social media platforms’ constantly changing algorithms.
But ShopMy’s co-founders say its approach diverges from that of competitors as it is pitching the platform as curation-first, as well as a permanent archive of creators’ recommendations, rather than attempting to constantly stay on the front foot of algorithm updates. It’s for this reason that ShopMy’s co-founders also believe their DTC platform holds more promise than in-app shopping has for social media platforms.
Instagram is relegating the Shop tab in favour of a renewed focus on content creation on the homepage. What does it mean for fashion and beauty brands?
“Those platforms are at their core entertainment platforms, and ours is completely not entertainment, it’s purely shopping,” Rein says. “It’s very hard to have those in the same platform. You only have a certain amount of tabs and surfaces you can show by default, so when a social platform rolls out shopping as the fourth tab, with all the content creation tools, it feels a little muddled.”
That said, ShopMy isn’t trying to bypass the social media platforms upon which the entire affiliate industry relies — creators won’t post directly on its platform, but they will continue posting on their socials. Instead, it’s aiming to be a “tool in the background”, to help creators give their social content a longer shelf life by cataloguing their recommendations through time.
This could come with its own challenges. ShopMy has grown fast thanks to the demonstrable ROI and quantifiable insights it offers brands, as well as the bridge it provides to creators to reach more brand partners. But attracting and converting consumers directly to yet another shopping platform — where multi-brand e-commerce sites have struggled to maintain customer loyalty — is a mammoth task. It also places the startup in competition with tech companies like OpenAI and Google, who are placing billions of dollars behind their race to become consumers’ go-to shopping funnel directly through AI search.
Still, ShopMy is betting on the assumption that the commercial power of the influencer isn’t disappearing any time soon, and is hoping that its personalised, curatorial approach will win consumers by helping to cut through the algorithm’s noise.
“The new platform multiplies creators’ recommendations on social, so they earn even more and it’s more permanent,” Rein says.
Where a creator’s audience may have missed their story post of a jacket on Saturday, for example, a shopper can now find that recommendation through ShopMy’s commerce platform on Monday, or even the next month, when they’re specifically searching for a jacket.
It’s this belief that the fleeting nature of social media posts is limiting from a shopper standpoint, which underpins ShopMy’s new consumer play.
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