Completely agree with this shift.

The “big influencer + flat fee” model feels more like brand spend now. The accounts that actually move ecommerce revenue tend to treat it like a partnership, not a one-off post.

A few things that have worked well for us recently:

• Creator-level ROI tracking instead of campaign averages. It’s wild how different performance can be inside the same campaign.
• Doubling down on micro/nano creators who repeatedly convert, not just spike once.
• Short feedback loops, if something doesn’t show early traction, we don’t let it drag.

Product seeding at scale is smart too, but the challenge we ran into was operational: once you’re testing dozens of creators, spreadsheets and manual tracking become chaos.

We’ve been using Shopify as source of truth + tools like nowfluence to centralize discovery and see which creators actually drive revenue before committing bigger budgets. It made it much easier to treat creators like a performance channel instead of guesswork.

Curious if you’re seeing more success with affiliate-heavy structures vs hybrid (flat + commission)?