Marketplace Briefing: Amazon looks to take a greater slice of the affiliate pie with Creator Connections
Ahead of the all-important holiday season, Amazon has been adding new functions designed to grow Creator Connections, its affiliate marketplace that connects brands with both influencers and publishers.
At the end of September, Amazon introduced Sponsored Content Requests — which is in invite-only mode, for now — to Creator Connections. This allows select brands to make requests to influencers directly within Creator Connections for sponsored content. Campaigns are flat-fee and include some rounds of revisions. Crucially, brands can also reuse the content in their Sponsored Brands Ads, with a content license that’s valid for up to 90 days.
Up until now, Creator Connections has been pretty bare-bones; brands set a budget, commission level and duration of an affiliate campaign, and influencers and publishers decide through Creator Connections whether or not they want to opt in. As sources describe it, it is a pretty low-lift way for merchants to drive incremental revenue. But the addition of Sponsored Content Requests suggests that Amazon is looking for ways to ensure more affiliate and influencer marketing is done directly through its ecosystem and is going after more than just bottom-of-the-funnel affiliate traffic.
Amazon isn’t alone in its desire to figure out new ways to crack the affiliate code; last month, Sephora launched MySephora Storefront, a storefront tool similar to LTK and ShopMy, that allows creators to pick a selection of Sephora products they want to feature and earn a 15% commission on all purchases.
Shep McAllister, affiliate marketing director at the agency Envision Horizons, believes affiliates will continue to play a big role in tentpole shopping events like Prime Day and Black Friday as shoppers look to trusted sources to make sense of what deals are actually worth it. He added that more publishers and influencers also seem to be participating in Creator Connections as Amazon is pushing it more.
He estimated that about half of Envision Horizon’s customers utilize Creator Connections. Most recently, clients who utilized Creator Connections during the Prime Big Deal Day sales event in both 2024 and 2025 saw a 244% year-over-year increase in affiliate-driven revenue, he said.
“That’s a function of just a lot more creators and a lot more publishers joining Creator Connections, or at least paying more attention to it,” he said.
Amazon made a big change in December that pushed more sellers, publishers and influencers to Creator Connections, he added. Essentially, Amazon updated its policy to prohibit creators from earning multiple commissions through different programs on the same shopper traffics. There are third-party services like Levanata and Wayward that have cropped up around Amazon and other big marketplaces like Walmart to help creators and publishers earn commissions on products bought through these platforms. It essentially forced creators to choose whether they wanted to use links generated by these companies or Amazon Associates Links, which is what Creator Connections uses.
“Ever since that change last December, most of the energy in the space has really flowed to Creator Connections, because it’s kind of the Amazon-approved, Amazon-operated version of the same system,” he said.
Will Haire, co-founder and CEO of the agency BellaVix, describes Creator Connections as a consistent way to drive incremental revenue; all of his clients at BellaVix use Creator Connections, and anywhere from 5-10% of their sales come through Creator Connections. But, he said, “the volume is not there” as much as he would like.
One of the big challenges for any brand in working with influencers is that it can require a lot of one-to-one negotiations; some influencers may want to try to negotiate on the commission structure, or get a free sample or get more detailed instructions on how to shoot a video that fits what the brand is looking for. The addition of Sponsored Requests is a way for Amazon to help streamline some of this work within the Amazon ecosystem. Sellers can create a brand brief where they can include more details about the brand, the products and the suggested talking points, as well as things the creator shouldn’t talk about. Creators have up to five business days to accept or deny a brand brief. Brands also get access to two rounds of revisions.
McAllister said he’s intrigued by the addition of Sponsored Content Requests, as UGC-style videos tend to outperform other types of creative, though Envision Horizons only has one client testing it out so far. “It’s nice that it’ll be a system built into Amazon. Hopefully, it will be a little bit more scalable, and [make for] a little bit more trust built into the system,” he said.
Still, he would like more granularity built into Creator Connections. “I would love the ability to offer different levels of commissions or different compensation models for different types of affiliates, depending on where they sit and funnel and the type of content they produce,” he said. “Obviously, the way affiliate typically works is that you pay your best affiliates the highest rates, and there’s just not a native way to do that within Creator Connections.”
Haire echoed the sentiment. “More controls over the right influencers participating would be great,” he said. He added that he’s seen some influencers who are technically within the Creator Connections program who seem like they haven’t posted in a few years.
But the holidays will provide a crucial test, in terms of how well the new sponsored content produced through Creator Connections performs and how the program continues to grow against other affiliate marketplaces.
McAllister, for his part, doesn’t see interest in affiliate slowing down. Even as AI upends the shopper journey, he thinks there’s a certain cohort of shoppers that goes to publishers and creators as a trusted source of recommendations.
“We’re definitely encouraging all of our clients to invest in affiliate — not just during these tentpole [sales] events, but also leading up to them, so they can introduce themselves to these creators and these publishers.”
Correction: This story has been updated to correct a comment from McAllister; he said that clients who utilized Creator Connections during the Prime Big Deal Day sales event in both 2024 and 2025 saw a 244% year-over-year increase in affiliate-driven revenue, not total revenue.
What I’m reading
- Walmart is the latest company to state that it will partner with OpenAI to offer instant checkout through ChatGPT.
- Amazon has stated that it plans to hire 250,00 seasonal workers this year, the same number as 2024.
- A Washington Post columnist tracked price changes in the lead-up to Prime Big Deals Day and found that, among the items he tracked, he would have saved only 0.6% by purchasing during Prime Big Deals Day.