Brands need an army of salespeople to compete today, and forever

Do we overcomplicate things with the talk of creators and affiliates? Probably, definitely maybe, perhaps, of course.

If you break it down, it's just people buying from (real-ish) people. Some have more influence, and others are more relatable to our everyday life. Both those things do different things to our propensity to convert in a certain timeframe.

Sure, the Kardashian-class make you aware of whatever skin treatment is all the rage right now.

But seeing Mary-down-the-road talk about the same product gets you to actually buy it.

Two different jobs. Two different timelines. Confuse them and you'll spend a quarter's budget proving the wrong one wrong.

Kardashian-style fame plays on the long clock: aware today, maybe buying in three months, or three years, or never, but the brand sits in the back of the skull regardless. Mary-style relatability plays on the short one. She posts. You buy by the weekend. An ecommerce brand needs both clocks running at once, which is exactly why hiring one influencer was always going to under-deliver. You needed an army, not a face.

Last time out here on The Checkout, I told you the ecommerce stack is overloading operators' brains: too many dashboards, too many half-integrated tools, all promising the one number that finally explains why the customer bought. You wave off the creator question for the opposite reason. Too many people, not enough software, so it must be a headcount line, not an infrastructure one. Wrong. Everything below is from strategy work I'm doing this month. Not a report somebody else published.

The channel already beating the shelf

Amazon invented affiliate commission in 1996 and the entire industry filed it under rounding error for the next twenty-five years. Funny how that works. Give an ordinary person a reason to recommend something, and a cut of what happens next, and eventually the rounding error becomes the balance sheet.

A gaming-hardware brand I've been advising launched its TikTok Shop about a year ago. It's now their best-performing retail channel…ahead of the accounts they spent years building with the big-box names everyone's heard of. Profitable purely on affiliate commission. Zero actual creators paid to date. One unboxing video, from someone who owes the brand nothing, sold out an entire end-of-life product line. Boosting the same video amplified the effect further.

Nobody wrote a brief. Nobody cast a creator. Nobody approved a media plan. A Mary found the product, liked it, and posted.

That's the now. The army doesn't need a media budget to start moving stock. It needs a commission worth a stranger's time, and enough strangers taking you up on it.

Why half an army loses every time

Most brands never get this far. The pattern repeats constantly across the accounts I see: commission set at 3–5% on a product that costs real money to make well, a handful of affiliates instead of hundreds, nobody senior owning the channel, a live-selling stream tried once and quietly dropped. Then the brand concludes the platform doesn't work.

It was never given the chance to.

Ask yourself the boring questions. How many affiliates do you actually have? How many posted this month? How many would notice tomorrow if you halved their commission? If the honest answer is a number you can count on one hand, you don't have an army. You have a pilot scheme wearing an army's uniform.

The army is built from Marys, not Kardashians, and the maths only works at volume…which is just behavioural science with a spreadsheet bolted on. People trust the recommendation that looks like their own life, not the one that looks like a magazine cover, and there are always more people who look like Mary than people who look like a Kardashian. One relatable affiliate selling out a product line is a nice story for a column. Hundreds of them, each relatable to a slightly different slice of your audience, is a channel that grows.

Going all-in is unglamorous. Real commission. Hundreds of affiliates. A real cadence. One owner, one job. That's the whole list, and most brands still won't do it. Here's the part that should change your mind: a channel already producing sales on minimum effort and zero strategy isn't a risk waiting to happen. It's the safest bet in the building.

Set expectations while you're at it and avoid the shiny toys in this world. Live selling is the tactic everyone wants to skip straight to. The honest number I keep repeating to a client right now is nine or ten attempts before a live stream produces anything close to meaningful sales. Judge the channel a crock after attempt two, and you've learned exactly one thing: that you gave up early. Persistence pays.

The forever future is owning the layer, not renting it

Here's the distinction that actually matters, and it's the one I keep coming back to in my own notes. Affiliate is pay-per-action. The creator takes a cut, the brand takes the risk, and the relationship resets the moment the algorithm changes its mind. Commerce is different. A brand, or a creator, owns the distribution layer and the relationship with the customer directly, instead of renting a placement inside somebody else's feed.

Commission isn't the price of a media placement. It's the price of a distribution channel…same as a retailer's margin, except this one your brand can eventually own outright.

That's the direction the smart operators are already moving, deliberately, while everyone else is still arguing about commission rates. A beauty brand I've advised already takes 70% of its revenue through its affiliate army. Not a media-plan side note. The primary channel. It also carries the cost operators are right to worry about: stack enough commission layers on top of each other — agency, platform, affiliate, advisory — and margin gets thin fast. The tempting response is to prune the army back and protect what's left.

Wrong fix. Climb the ladder (or “go on a journey” as everyone says) instead: from paying for the action to owning the relationship the action created. Platforms reward the climb, too. Go all-in properly and you get treated as a case-study merchant: better fees, earlier access to promotions, a level of protection a rented ad placement never earns. Nobody hands that to a pilot scheme.

Running the army well

Strategy before tactics. Always. Map the SKUs, the markets, the mix of affiliates versus bigger creators, before anyone touches a bloody pixel. Size the commission to the product, not to what feels comfortable on a marketing budget line. Put someone senior's name against the channel as their actual job, not a task that floats to whoever's free on a Wednesday.

Pay the commission. Stop calling it rent. It's the entry fee: a channel that moves product without waiting on a platform's wild mood swings (hello Meta Andromeda and TikTok Shop fees), a customer relationship nobody can quietly deprecate, an army of business partnerships that's actually yours.