Affiliate Marketing: TikTok, Amazon, and Your Indie Shop
TikTok and Amazon are battling in the retail space. TikTok wants to be a retailer, and Amazon wants to be more of an influencer platform. These two share the same goal: get users to share a product link, recommend the product, and get a cut of the sale, shares The Wall St. Journal.
This article and these companies speak to the power of affiliate marketing. One of Amazon’s long-standing secret growth weapons has been affiliate commissions, and influencers are a well-known ingredient to driving social media retail sales. The companies seems to want to expand the definition of what is a considered an influencer: what if anyone, no matter how small their following, can be an influencer and get a commission?
Excerpt:
……
Amazon has made strides since 2017 when it launched an influencer program, luring creators with financial incentives. For some, the payouts have become enough to replace a normal full-time job, as it did for Michelle Lei, who quit her role as a software engineer last year to become a full-time Amazon influencer.
She said she can earn thousands of dollars a month, including one-off commissions from brands. She promotes home-decor products on sale at Amazon through her TikTok and Instagram channels.
Amazon recently started offering influencers more analytics and tools to make it easier for them to track online traffic and sales, and now hosts retreats for influencers.
But influencers are TikTok’s bread and butter.
Kayla Ruliffson, 20, promotes makeup and skin-care products to her 100,000 TikTok followers. She first came across TikTok Shop while she was making a video about a skin-care product in July. The app prompted her to tag the product, then linked to a place to buy it in the app.
Ruliffson said she made $3,000 within a few days.
A month later, she uploaded a video promoting a teeth-whitening tool on TikTok Shop. With that video, she said she earned more than $20,000. Her payouts from Amazon had never totaled more than $1,000 a month before.
……
I believe that indie stores need to embrace affiliate marketing and this “mini-fluencer” trend. For example, a retailer can opt in its gift registrants to their affiliate program. The store can give the bride-to-be a unique code and URL that she can share and earn money with. The bride can earn money when people use her link to buy goods. Many stores already offer the bride a finder’s fee if she gets a friend to sign up for a registry—this is just an extension of that. The goal: turn brides into store ambassadors and revenue generators. This is good for the bride, too: she can earn commissions and use it to buy items off her registry.
In an era of TikTok and social media, our stores need to leverage the masses via affiliate incentives to draw in traffic and increase orders.
Shop Local’s service will soon include a built-in affiliate marketing program. By using Shop Local, an indie store will have instant access to an affiliate service for gift registrants. It will be able to leverage existing customers to gain new customers and grow its business.
Stats from the article:
Amazon handles $600m in retail sales every day around the globe and TikTok $7m.
Amazon’s marketplace has 1m users.
TikTok’s marketplace has 200k.
Users spend 2 hours on TikTok and 9 minutes on Amazon.