ShopMy Might Be Bringing Affiliate Links Into Your Group Chats

Tracy Green was recently on a trip with seven friends who are all turning 40 this year. They got to talking about their favourite products, trading recommendations for concealers and creatine supplements. The group found it so helpful that Green thought others in her network might benefit from the same intel. Dispensing shopping tips, she figured, might even become a viable side gig.

Green applied for an account on affiliate marketing platform ShopMy using a referral code from a friend who’d joined a few weeks earlier, and soon she was posting commission-earning links to about 1,900 followers on her Instagram Stories. “Within a couple weeks, I made over $500,” the freelance publicist and jewellery designer in Scottsdale, Arizona, says. “That is nice extra money to have for a mom with three kids under 8.”

Affiliate links are everywhere. Historically, they’ve been tools for creators with huge followings to sell us everyday items, like $8 lip gloss, or more aspirational things, like a $6,900 floating diamond necklace. But now regular people are following in creators’ entrepreneurial steps, sharing commissionable links with their own modest social media followings and even in personal group chats. ShopMy, a newer entrant to the affiliate marketing space that connects fashion, beauty and lifestyle brands to creators, has become the platform of choice for both groups. With its relatively frictionless application process and referral incentives, users are reaping high commissions paid by brands on the platform — in the 10 percent to 30 percent range — as well as other lucrative perks. Creators have always leveraged parasocial relationships, but it seems our real ones may be next.

“The bottom has fallen out of the culture of generosity around recommendations. It has all become monetised,” says Jenna Drenten, a professor of marketing who studies digital consumer culture at the Quinlan School of Business at Loyola University Chicago. “It’s an extension of what I might call the multi-level marketing scheme of influencer culture — this idea that anyone can make money off the internet, and there’s so much money to be had.” (MLM is a sales model whereby people sell directly to contacts and also recruit others to do the same; Avon is the classic example.)

Affiliate selling is almost as old as e-commerce: Amazon, which has one of the largest affiliate initiatives, started its Associates program in 1996. Since the pandemic, when marketing materials couldn’t be made in-house and brands allocated more of their budgets to creators, the earning potential for both parties has been supercharged, says Jared Watson, an assistant professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Now, he says, “it’s massive.” Affiliate marketing powers a bustling economy, driving about $216 billion in US e-commerce sales in 2025, more than double the $99 billion recorded in 2020, according to data from research firm eMarketer.

Affiliate links are actually found far beyond the creator sphere. Credit card rewards programs, coupon sites and cash-back platforms like Rakuten all use them; in those cases, both the shopper and the entity that steered them to wherever they made their purchase get a cut of the sale. They’re also found on recommendation sites like New York Times’ Wirecutter, along with many other publications that get commissions from readers’ purchases. In affiliate marketing’s most simplistic form, brands or retailers provide links to creators, either directly or via an affiliate platform like Awin, Impact or ShopMy’s biggest competitor for its fashionphile users, LTK. Consumers do not pay extra when purchasing through an affiliate link.

ShopMy, founded in 2020, is valued at $1.5 billion, hosting roughly 329,000 creators and 40,000 brands. The platform targets a specific niche of tastemaker, and it’s distinguished itself by signing many small indie fashion and beauty brands, like Rachel Comey and Dieux, says Tiffany Lopinsky, ShopMy’s co-founder and president. Brands pay about a 2.9 percent commission to the platform in addition to creator commissions, plus around $400 to $8,000 per month, depending on their level of access to sales metrics and creators on the platform. Former magazine editors with large Substack shopping newsletters were early adopters, and celebrity stylists and personal shoppers with private Instagram accounts “drive very high tickets,” Lopinsky says. Subject-matter experts also tend to do well: “Dermatologists can move an absolutely insane amount of product.”

Grace Atwood, a 44-year-old creator in Charleston, South Carolina, who started as a blogger in 2010, makes an annual income in the low seven figures from her blog The Stripe, Instagram (which has more than 201,000 followers) and Substack (where she has 57,000 subscribers). She says that 75 percent of her earnings in 2026 so far have come via affiliate links, up from 44 percent in 2023. She is a top-five converter on ShopMy, meaning that when people click the affiliate links she posts, they often buy. In July her order volume was $891,000. She says she wants her subscribers “to see my channels as like a shoppable magazine.”

Money is also flowing to users with smaller platforms who don’t necessarily have capital-I influencer aspirations, like Stephanie Dresher, 27, in New York City, who, like Green, works in PR. (Since publicists work closely with brands and creators, affiliate marketing seems to be a natural extension of their skillset.) Dresher says she’s “always been the friend that people text asking, ‘Where’s your jacket from?’” Now she earns money from the links she texts them, dropping them into her Instagram Stories and group chats about vacation outfits or new workout sets. “I was already curating products and making recommendations every day, so using affiliate links just made sense to me.”

ShopMy used to have higher follower count requirements, but it has seen that even people with smaller networks can sell a lot. “How I talk about it with the brands is there’s basically two jobs: find new sellers and keep sellers selling, and those sellers could be people with 2,000 to 3,000 followers,” Lopinsky says. “You can’t build a program around a couple of white-whale people.” Now many ShopMy users, including those interviewed for this story, say they’re getting approved in less than a day, often using referral codes that can earn the referring party as much as $1,000.

On the ShopMy subreddit, people routinely drop their referral links to cajole others to join, lending credence to Drenten’s MLM comparison. Both Dresher and Green have friends who’ve used their referral codes and been accepted. One of Green’s family members owns a children’s salon and is a Pilates instructor; she uses her links to share “kid and mom stuff,” Green says. Another is a stay-at-home-mom friend from her child’s school. Dresher says many of her co-workers have signed up and are posting ShopMy links, “and my friends too — it’s really been a topic of conversation.”

Besides commissions, ShopMy also provides other income options. With “flat-fee bonus campaigns” — which the platform calls “opportunities” — brands incentivise creators to post more frequently. “It will be like, ‘Do three links, two social media mentions and you will be paid $500,’” says Kim France, the 62-year-old writer of the popular fashion newsletter Girls of a Certain Age and founding editor-in-chief of the now-defunct shopping magazine Lucky. “That’s a huge amount of how I make my living now.” Atwood says she averages about 30 such bonuses a month. Both influencers have gotten hundreds of gifts from brands — facilitated by ShopMy. Just a few months in, Dresher reached ShopMy’s highest tier and has participated in some paid “opportunities”; Green is in a lower tier but has netted 86 gifts from brands.

On the receiving end, many people are clueless about what happens when they click a link, particularly when it’s in a text or Instagram story from a friend. “The behind-the-scenes of how affiliate links work remains very murky to the common consumer,” says Drenten, who calls the practice a “black box.” They don’t “really understand that it is a form of paid promotion.” While some creators, including Atwood, disclose that they’re making commissions on the content they post on Substack, almost no one discloses it on Instagram or in texts.

“I don’t think they understand the affiliate and the commission and the kickback, and that I’m benefiting from it,” Green says of her friends and followers. She does not include disclosures when she posts affiliate links to Instagram. Nor does Dresher when she sends recommendations to her friends. “I don’t know if people really think twice about it, though,” she says. “They just kind of see it as a recommendation that feels authentic, and they’re happy to use the link whether it gives someone money back or whatnot.”

The pervasive lack of disclosures may fly in the face of consumer-protection guidance in the US. The Federal Trade Commission’s guide for social media marketing for affiliate links is vague but does state that a disclosure should be made if a “significant minority” of a person’s followers may not realise they have a “material connection” to a brand. Affiliate link disclosure should be “clear and conspicuous” and “the closer to the recommendation, the better.” The FTC declined to answer specific questions about how it expects users to disclose affiliate links and about how or if it polices the practice.

While the advantage of affiliate links is obvious for creators and brands, the benefit to consumers is far more nebulous. Drenten, for one, thinks it’s a timesaver for people to get free-flowing recommendations online. Consumers also enjoy getting a distinct point of view from someone whose taste they trust as well as learning about brands and products they might not find on their own, a function historically served by magazines, which included plenty of undisclosed paid product placements themselves.

“Everyone is an influencer nowadays. You’re influencing someone no matter what you’re doing,” Dresher says. “It’s cool that you can speak to brands just being someone that’s a regular person that influences other regular people.”

By Cheryl Wischhover

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