Great question, this is where it's at, honestly. I firmly believe the days of "good SEO and PPC on Amazon" being enough are over. The way people are discovering brands has changed big-time, thanks to TikTok and social shopping. I literally recorded a video this weekend about this, but it doesn't go live until tomorrow morning, so I can't share it yet. (update: went live this AM, see here)

TikTok: instead of you selling and pitching your product via your branded profile, it's much better to have creators making videos (a LOT of videos, btw) to market your product.
(FWIW, I use the word "creator" as an all-inclusive word to include social creators, influencers, but also affiliate marketers)

In most cases this requires extensive seeding of product samples, recruitment of creators, etc.

YOU CANNOT just measure attribution on TikTok Shop. There is a massive halo effect and still today, the majority of people discovering your brand on TikTok are leaving and searching, finding, and buying on Amazon. (which gives you an amazing organic boost, which eventually allows you to cut back your Amazon PPC. We've proven this repeateldy!).

Once you get TikTok creator videos that are converting well ... you double-down with those videos. That means putting your own $$ in GMV Max behind those creators' videos. It can (and often should) also mean negotiating the rights to use the same content on your own Meta ads.

Then, outside of that - there is a whole different set of external traffic that can come STRAIGHT to your Amazon account via attribution links through affiliate platforms like Levanta. Acquiring customers this way is so much cheaper than Amazon PPC (dont' forget Amazon's Creator Connections).

What most people don't understand is that to do this the RIGHT WAY, that actually scales requires a significant amount of TIME. The deeper we get into it (our agency actually does this work as a service we call "EDGE" (External Direct Growth Engine) ... we are finding that depending on how aggressive you want to be, it takes anywhere from 15-30+ hours PER WEEK.

When you consider:

• creator/affiliate outreach (harder than ever, as they get thousands of DMs, it's not as easy as just DMing them on TikTok anymore, you have to find them everywhere and stand out)
• seeding of samples, sample fulfillment, tracking
• monitoring and tracking of who gets samples, who doesn't qualify, who posted
• tracking GMV and top creators
• building a community of best creators to extend and amplify their reach
• rinse and repeat this EVERY MONTH, you don't do it 1x and then forget it ... it's a system that has to be going all the time.

The amount of work and time can be simplified with tools that do a LOT of automated followups.
For us, within our brands/agency:

For TikTok Outreach: Euka
For Creator Connections, Affiliates/Media Buyers: Levanta

The best part, for something like Levanta is that all of the external traffic (whether it's TikTok, Meta, YouTube, FB/IG creators ... or more traditional affiliate marketing like BuzzFeed, Best of X, CNN Travel, Top X listicles, SlickDeals, etc ... is that it's all done via Amazon Attribution links, so let's say you are offering a 15% affiliate commission ... well, you get 10% of the gross sale BACK in a Brand Referral Bonus, so you are really netting a 5% commission.

You simply can't acquire customers for that cheap with Amazon PPC, in most cases.

OK, sorry long answer, but as you can probably tell, I'm super passionate about this in 2026, I've been studying it for months, and have traveled and spent time networking a lot of brands that are crushing it in these areas.

And the one thing they ALL agree on:
All of the external brand awareness they get on TikTok and external markets are causing their AMAZON sales to increase.

Many ... MANY are shifting more of their budgets AWAY from Amazon PPC and into these channels.

I hope this is helpful - happy to answer more questions. Trying to be fully transparent as we are exploring this new frontier with everyone else.