August 29, 2025
10 Min
Case Study: How Beau Bottles Drove $82K in Sales and Viral UGC Using Influencer Hero
Affiliate marketing is now a key driver of brand growth. Nearly 88% of consumers are influenced to buy when a product is recommended by an influencer they trust.
For brands, the way influencers share products matters more than ever. While individual affiliate links can deliver quick wins, storefronts are reshaping the affiliate landscape — creating higher posting frequency, better product discovery, and more sustained visibility for the brands behind them.
Instead of relying on one-off affiliate links that may only generate short bursts of traffic, storefronts give influencers a clean, curated space to showcase multiple products. For brands, this means your products don’t just appear once in a story — they live inside a storefront where they’re seen repeatedly and in context with complementary items.
To understand how this impacts brands, we conducted a 9-week study of 47 beauty and lifestyle influencers (micro to macro). We tracked posting behavior across Amazon Storefronts, LTK, ShopMy, and direct brand affiliate links. The findings reveal clear trends that brands can leverage to optimize their influencer affiliate strategies.
In this article, we’ll break down the findings, explain why storefronts are becoming essential for influencer partnerships, and show how platforms like Influencer Hero help brands centralize affiliate activity, track conversions, and scale storefront collaborations for higher ROI.
Before we dive into the numbers and behavior we observed in our study, it’s helpful to clarify the difference between affiliate links and storefronts.
An affiliate link is a direct, trackable link that takes your audience straight to a specific product. When a follower clicks on one of these links, a tracking cookie is placed in their browser. This cookie records activity and any purchases made, so you can earn a commission on the sales they generate.
For brands, affiliate links are highly effective when promoting a specific SKU — such as a hero product, new launch, or limited-time offer — because they allow for clear attribution and straightforward ROI measurement.
A storefront functions like a curated shop where influencers showcase multiple products in one place. Instead of followers clicking through scattered links, they explore an organized collection — often styled and contextualized by the influencer.
For brands, this format is powerful because your products are displayed in context, encouraging browsing and increasing the chance of multiple-item purchases. Storefronts also extend the life of campaigns: products remain discoverable long after an individual post or story disappears.
Affiliate links are great for helping brands push a single product quickly and track performance, especially when influencers share them in dedicated stories or posts. But they can feel limiting, since they only drive attention to one item at a time and leave less room for audiences to explore a brand’s wider catalog.
Storefronts, on the other hand, let influencers showcase multiple products at once, creating a more seamless shopping experience that encourages browsing.
For brands, this means more chances for cross-selling, stronger product discovery, and deeper audience engagement. Storefronts may take a little more setup and can make tracking each product individually trickier, but they give brands a bigger long-term payoff in visibility and sales.
To get a clearer picture of how influencer behavior impacts brands, we spent 9 weeks tracking 47 creators in the beauty, fashion, and lifestyle niche — ranging from nano influencers with just over 5,000 followers to macro influencers with more than 300,000.
We chose this niche because it’s one of the most active in affiliate marketing, and for good reason: fashion alone represents over 23% of all affiliate programs, making it a natural testing ground for storefront adoption.
Our research began with a simple goal: track how often influencers posted links to platforms like LTK and Amazon Storefront. But as the weeks went on, new behaviors emerged.
By week two, we noticed many influencers were also sharing individual brand affiliate links, so we started tracking those as well. Soon, storefront links weren’t just appearing in stories — they were being placed in bios too, signaling a more permanent integration into influencers’ content.
As we followed these creators over time, we uncovered evolving habits, new ways of linking content, and even platforms we hadn’t initially planned to include. By the end of the study, the results provided fresh insights into how influencers are promoting products in 2025 — and what that means for brands looking to maximize exposure and sales through affiliate partnerships.
Here’s a week-by-week breakdown of what we found:
What we analyzed: In our first week, we focused on tracking how many influencers shared links to Amazon Storefront and LTK, and how often they did so.
Weekly Posting Activity by Platform:
Observations and Insights:
What we analyzed: During week 2, we expanded our tracking to include individual brand affiliate links, since we noticed creators were sharing many of these alongside storefront links. Popular brands like Walmart, Revolve, Sephora, and Target appeared frequently.
Weekly Posting Activity by Platform:
Observations and Insights:
What we analyzed: During weeks 3 and 4, influencer activity remained steady with Amazon and LTK storefronts continuing to lead over individual brand affiliate links. The participation from dedicated affiliate accounts showed consistency, reinforcing these platforms as the preferred choice.
Observations and Insights:
What we analyzed: During week 5, we continued tracking LTK and Amazon posts, as well as individual brand affiliate posts. Additionally, we noticed a significant number of influencers sharing links to their personal blogs through stories and reels.
Observations and Insights:
What we analyzed: We observed that influencers increasingly share storefront links that follow a different style or format than traditional Amazon or LTK storefronts. To capture this emerging trend, we introduced a new category to track this type of storefront, exemplified here by platforms like ShopMy, which is common within the niche we studied.
Observations and Insights:
What we analyzed: During these weeks, we observed that more influencers posted at least one direct brand affiliate link compared to Amazon Storefronts.
While the number of influencers sharing brand links was higher, the volume of posts per influencer was still greater for storefronts like Amazon, LTK, and ShopMy. Notably, in week 7, brand affiliate links surpassed Amazon Storefronts in total post volume, but this was an exception as weeks 8 and 9 showed Amazon with higher posting frequency again. Overall, storefronts remain the dominant focus in terms of total posts despite fewer influencers posting them.
Observations and Insights:
Looking at posting frequency over weeks 1–5 and 6–9, the data paints a clear picture: Storefront platforms consistently dominate influencer activity compared to direct brand affiliate links.
Amazon Storefronts are the clear leaders, with posting volumes frequently exceeding 15 posts per week. Direct brand affiliate links, in contrast, never surpass around 6 posts weekly. This means while more influencers might test brand links occasionally, the steady, high-volume posting happens on Storefronts.
Influencers don’t stick to just one affiliate or storefront platform. Many creators share links across Amazon, LTK, ShopMy, and brand affiliate links all at once. It’s common for the same influencer to post on multiple platforms rather than focusing on only one.
Some influencers run accounts focused almost entirely on storefronts like Amazon or LTK. These accounts post at very high frequency, often dozens of times per week, with curated finds and themed collections. Partnerships with these types of influencers generate consistent, repeated visibility that outperforms one-off affiliate posts.
For example, influencer Jenna Wood (@hellojennawood) dedicates her account to sharing LTK links. If you follow her stories, you’ll notice an endless row of little white dots at the top of your screen—each one a link you could keep tapping through for quite some time.
She mainly focuses on story posts but also creates reels, often compiling her recent purchases and offering to share the links via DM.
We’ve seen that influencers often share individual affiliate links. Since not all brands are part of storefronts, these links allow influencers to promote brands that don’t fit into a larger storefront network. While more influencers post different brand links, these links are generally shared less often per creator than storefront links.
Although fewer influencers post storefront links compared to individual brand links, storefront posts dominate in total volume. This means that while more creators might share brand links occasionally, the bulk of affiliate content comes from storefronts like Amazon, LTK, and ShopMy.
Influencers also rely on personal blogs or “link in bio” tools to organize affiliate links and storefronts in one place. These hubs extend the life of campaigns, giving audiences a single destination to return to for recommendations and shopping inspiration.
Take Maegan Brown (@thebakermama), for example. She posts her delicious recipes on Instagram and always links back to her blog, where she’s got a full shop section with all her favorite Amazon finds and LTK picks.
Every time she shares a recipe, she also shows exactly which utensils, baking molds, and tools she used, making it super easy for followers to shop her favorites while trying her recipes. It’s a perfect way to turn a personal blog into a go-to spot for inspiration and shopping at the same time.
Similarly, “link in bio” tools like Linktree or storefront URLs in social media bios help influencers keep their links accessible and organized, making it easier for followers to find everything they promote.
Instagram Stories remain the top format for affiliate content. Their casual, high-frequency nature makes them a reliable channel for product visibility, while reels and static posts play a smaller but complementary role.
Our study shows influencers use a mix of storefronts, direct affiliate links, and “link in bio” hubs to share products. For brands, this creates challenges: tracking sales across platforms, managing commissions, and keeping collaborations consistent.
Influencer Hero brings it all together. Beyond managing affiliate links, the platform also allows brands to set up custom creator storefronts. This gives every influencer you work with a branded hub to showcase your products, making it easier to drive ongoing sales and strengthen long-term partnerships.
Our study shows that while both affiliate links and storefronts play a role, storefronts are quickly becoming the centerpiece of influencer affiliate marketing in 2025. They don’t just give influencers a curated space — they give brands more visibility, stronger product discovery, and deeper audience engagement.
Affiliate links remain valuable for quick promotions and single-SKU pushes, but storefronts create the consistency and scale needed for long-term results. Brands that activate storefronts for their creators see higher posting frequency, more chances for cross-selling, and stronger loyalty from both influencers and their audiences.
With Influencer Hero, brands can move beyond scattered affiliate links and fragmented storefront platforms. Our all-in-one solution makes it easy to set up branded creator storefronts, track performance across every influencer, and scale campaigns with confidence.
Ready to see how storefronts can transform your influencer strategy? Book a demo and discover how to maximize ROI from every creator partnership.
Storefronts encourage influencers to feature multiple products in one place, leading to more consistent exposure, higher product discovery, and stronger opportunities for cross-selling. Affiliate links are useful for short-term pushes, but storefronts deliver more sustained visibility and sales over time.
Yes. With Influencer Hero, brands can set up branded creator storefronts where influencers showcase your products in a curated, cohesive way. This creates a consistent shopping experience that reflects your brand identity.
Influencer Hero tracks clicks, conversions, and commissions across both storefronts and affiliate links in real time. Brands can see exactly which influencers and products drive revenue, making it easier to optimize campaigns.
That’s not a problem. Influencer Hero complements existing storefronts by giving you centralized performance tracking, plus the ability to launch branded storefronts directly for your own campaigns.
Setup is simple and doesn’t require complex integrations. Brands can create storefronts, add products, and invite influencers within minutes — making it easy to scale campaigns fast.
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