As thousands of brands invest in influencer marketing campaigns, why do they direct valuable traffic to generic homepages? This question prompted Kenyon Brown and Chai Pilaka to establish CreatorCommerce, a platform transforming brand-creator collaboration in online retail. As co-founder and CEO, Kenyon is introducing a co-selling approach that elevates casual affiliate partnerships into strategic business alliances.

Building Lasting Brand-Creator Partnerships

CreatorCommerce’s mission is to ensure co-selling “doesn’t fizzle out.” 

“I think there’s so much hype behind it,” Kenyon says. “You could easily see a world where it gets affiliate linked to death, becomes a fad, and becomes a joke that people tell in 20 years about how you remember when people would share affiliate links all the time.”

Rather than using traditional affiliate marketing, CreatorCommerce enables brands to build deeper partnerships through curated storefronts. 

“We want that to feel more like you’re an extension of that business,” Kenyon says. “You’re a sales channel. You’re not just like this fleeting moment sharing that discount code. That might not resonate with every creator, but for the creators who care a lot about monetization and want to be around in years to come, we think it’s the smart way to build from a creator perspective.”

Identifying the Affiliate Marketing Gap

Kenyon’s path to founding CreatorCommerce began at Tapcart, where he identified a significant disconnect in major brands’ digital strategy. 

“These are the same people who would always poke us and bother us about how perfect their conversion experience needs to be in their mobile app,” he recalls. “But when it came to their affiliate and influencer funnel, for some reason, it was a blind eye.”

The core issue was evident: brands were “paying all these personalities exorbitant amounts of money to post and create all this content and then people would click those links and land on the generic homepage,” Kenyon explains. “All that content and production that went into getting the click gets left behind.”

Kenyon highlights the challenges with traditional affiliate links: “People often forget to buy through the affiliate link. Sometimes you might screw things up, and you click the affiliate link on your computer, but then you go on your phone, and you buy it there.”

The CreatorCommerce Solution

The platform operates across four key components, each designed to create a seamless experience for brands, creators, and consumers:

1. Creator Activation

When brands connect CreatorCommerce to existing affiliate platforms like GRIN, the system automatically generates personalized invitations to creators. 

“We send out invites that say, ‘Hey, we want to take this partnership to that next level and unlock a better earning opportunity for you with your storefront,'” Kenyon explains.

The activation process requires minimal brand involvement. 

“The brand’s not doing anything as this is happening. They’re just sitting back and chilling,” Kenyon adds. “But we take all those curations and color suggestions and profile pictures that all these creators are uploading and then apply them to independent pages and storefronts for each creator. That could be 50, 1,000, or 100,000.”

The system scales efficiently: “As a brand, you might have 2,000 storefronts,” Kenyon states. “The process of making those storefronts is that the brand only has to make one storefront once, which is the template. Then, in that template, they set which sections will dynamically change based on what the creator provides.”

2. Conversion Optimization

Each creator receives a co-branded storefront that functions as a standalone website or integrates directly into the brand’s domain. 

“We’re the only platform that puts it directly on the brand’s domain in their theme,” Kenyon notes. “Do you want to empower your creators and let them have their brands, or do you want to pull them into your brand? We’re the only platform on the market that offers both.”

Image: CreatorCommerce’s conversion grid

The platform offers extensive customization: “If the creator is going to leave an endorsement, we have sections that will show whatever the creator provides. If this section shows images, then you can pull in images using variables like {{creator.drops.media}}; for example, at the end of the day, we are a CMS that syncs creator data with your owned storefronts,” Kenyon details.

According to him, this personalization creates a more genuine shopping experience that maintains the creator’s voice. 

“Be kind of loud and proud about it,” Kenyon stresses. “These are creator commerce partnerships. They are not the standard Rakuten links that you’re just grabbing. These are earned partnerships where brands want you to share space with us.”

3. Seamless Attribution

The platform eliminates traditional affiliate links and discount codes. 

“We automatically apply those discount codes to checkout, and they’re unique, so they never get leaked,” Kenyon explains.

Image: CreatorCommerce’s attribution grid

This automation addresses a frequent issue in affiliate marketing: consumers accessing affiliate links on one device but buying using another. The solution is to make the experience “visually look different than the homepage, so it’s easy to remember that difference.”

The platform provides comprehensive tracking: “We give sales numbers, we give click numbers, and there’s more we would like to share over time,” Kenyon says. 

“They should both be reading from the same result sheet because they both have roles to play, and if you can help your creators get better and understand what worked and what didn’t with their content and how that affected sales, it’s only going to help you,” he adds.

4. Creator Retention

CreatorCommerce positions creators as genuine business partners. 

“If you as a brand can get even 60-80% of your influencers to commit to building out a little space with you, that’s equity,” Kenyon points out. “That sets the stage for you to take care of them, engage them when you launch new products, and let them launch those products on their storefront two days before you put it on their website.”

The platform includes partnership management tools. “Give them a heads-up about promotions a few days early, work them into your marketing cycle so they work their way into building something with you,” Kenyon explains. “We have tools that help you coordinate and tell them what to do. It’s called ‘Campaigns.’”

Maximizing Shopify Integration

CreatorCommerce’s success relies heavily on its Shopify integration.

“Shopify checkout is the highest converting checkout on the Internet,” Kenyon reveals. “It converts about 30% higher than the next alternative.”

The integration serves multiple purposes: “We integrate with Shopify directly. We’re like a native Shopify app,” Kenyon explains. “What that means is that we pull in the brand’s product catalog from Shopify, and then when we create checkouts, whether we create a checkout on the brand’s website or we create a checkout on some of these separate hosted experiences, we can create, wherever we create a checkout, we always funnel it back to the brand’s Shopify checkout.”

Data Transparency and Future Growth

Kenyon advocates for complete transparency between brands and creators. 

“Both sides should be completely transparent with each other on data,” he states. “No brand should withhold data from the influencers. They should have full-funnel tracking, and that’s something we’re working on the platform and giving.”

The entrepreneur anticipates new developments in the creator economy. 

“I think brands will inevitably start doing more creator-exclusive SKUs, a special color journal for just that creator,” he predicts. “Maybe that same journal is exclusive to another creator in a different region, so there’s no possible cross-promotion there.”

“Just as shopping experiences are more effective at converting sales when they’re personalized, onboarding experiences for creators can be more effective if they’re personalized to the creator,” Kenyon concludes.