How do I set up my own creator storefront for product recommendations?

The main difference from running your own online shop is who sells. On a creator platform you usually only recommend, and your community buys from the shop, which is the seller.

According to Linktree’s help pages, you can sell digital products, courses and bookings through Linktree in Germany. Linktree Shops, its programme for earning commission on products, is only available in the US.

Details about the other providers come from their FAQs, terms and help pages. If you already have a large community and links on LTK, Stylink or Amazon, you are more likely asking what another storefront adds and how much work it takes: what you are paid for, how products and links get into the storefront, if the platform requires exclusivity and if your agency can work on it with you.

• wyrld suits you if you recommend products from lots of different shops and don’t want to hunt down the links yourself. You paste a product link, wyrld looks for the same item across more than 90,000 partner shops and creates the affiliate link for each offer it finds. Your community sees the offers found with prices side by side and buys wherever they like. Depending on the shop, you are paid per click, per sale or both, your agency can work in the same storefront, and the creator terms require no exclusivity.
• LTK suits you if you mainly want to earn on sales and collect your posts in one app with your own LTK shop. According to its FAQ, once accepted you get a personal manager from LTK.
• Stylink suits you if you want to be paid for genuine clicks, so even when nobody buys after the click, and you mainly link on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube or a blog.
• The Amazon Influencer Program suits you if you mainly recommend products available on Amazon and want to show them on your own page on Amazon.
• A link-in-bio page suits you if you work with only a few programmes and handle the sign-ups and links for each one yourself.
• Your own online shop suits you if you want to sell your own goods and take care of stock, shipping and legal texts yourself.

1. Pick a platform and sign up: read its terms first to see if it pays for clicks, sales or both, if it requires exclusivity, if only businesses can join and if it has a follower minimum.
2. Set up your profile: picture, name, a sentence about you and your channels.
3. Add products: search the platform’s catalogue or, where possible, paste the link to a product. Then sort them into collections, for example by occasion, category or video.
4. Your own pictures: if the platform allows it, show products the way you use them rather than only with the shop’s photo.
5. Share and disclose: put the storefront link in your bio. According to the guide by Germany’s media authorities (Die Medienanstalten), you mark affiliate links with an asterisk (*) and an explanation right next to the link. Posts you are paid for or get something in return for are clearly marked as advertising, in an image post for example with “Werbung” or “Anzeige” (advertisement) at the start.
6. Point to it in your content: say in the video or caption where the products are, rather than waiting for people to check your bio on their own. In Stories, add the product link as a link sticker where the platform offers one.

Say you show your morning routine with six products in a video. In your storefront you create a collection called “Morning routine”, add the six products and use a still from the video as your own photo. In the video you say: “Everything from this routine is in my storefront, link in bio.”

Next to the link in your bio, a short sentence says that the links in your storefront are affiliate links. The video itself may then count as advertising too: the media authorities count naming where to buy a product, and combining a post with affiliate links, among the signs of an advertising purpose. In that case, label the video as advertising as well.

A few weeks later you go through the collection again. If a product has sold out or you no longer use it, you take it out. That way the storefront is still accurate when someone finds the video months later.

On wyrld, a social commerce platform from Hamburg, step 3 looks like this: you paste the link to a product or pick it from the catalogue. wyrld recognises the brand, name and variant, looks for the same item across more than 90,000 partner shops, over a billion products in total, Amazon included, and creates the affiliate link for each offer it finds. You don’t sign up with any affiliate network yourself. For step 4, you can upload up to five of your own pictures per product and hide the shop’s pictures if you want.

Your community sees the offers with prices side by side and buys wherever they like, directly from the shop and at no extra cost. According to Bitkom (2022), 65% of online shoppers in Germany see the lowest price as a decisive factor when choosing a shop. Depending on the shop, you earn per click, per sale or both, and at the start of the following month you receive a Gutschrift (self-billing credit note), so there is no invoice for you to write. wyrld is free for creators.

If you work with an agency, it gets its own dashboard, works on your storefront with you and sees the same numbers. Through wyrld Boost, brands pay for campaigns that run across many creators, based on KPIs they set in advance; you decide for yourself if you take part. The creator terms require no exclusivity and set no follower minimum. Your storefront can be reached at its own address straight after sign-up; it appears in the creator overview after the wyrld team has reviewed your profile, and there is no entitlement to that.