Rethinking Affiliate, Creator, and Marketplaces with Levanta

The E-Commerce Brand's Guide to Unified Performance Marketing in 2026

If your affiliate and influencer teams are still working in separate silos with separate budgets and separate tools, this episode will challenge everything about how you've structured your program. Lauryn Day, Director of Agency Partnerships at Levanta, joins Lee-Ann to explain why the lines between affiliate and creator marketing have blurred beyond the point of separate strategies, what a unified approach actually looks like in practice, and why the brands thriving right now are the ones that have stopped treating these two channels as competitors for budget.

This is a practical, no-nonsense conversation about how modern e-commerce brands are scaling creator and affiliate programs across Amazon, Shopify, and Walmart, and what the data tells us about where discovery and conversion are actually happening in 2026.

About Lauryn Day

Lauryn Day is Director of Agency Partnerships at Levanta, the leading affiliate marketing software for marketplace sellers. Having started her career on the brand side before moving into tech, she brings a practical, dual-perspective view to creator and affiliate strategy that is rare in this space.

Talking Points Include:

• Why most affiliate infrastructure was built more than 20 years ago and no longer reflects how brands actually operate, and what a modern platform built for today's e-commerce reality looks like
  
• How Levanta's one-click integration with Amazon, Shopify, and Walmart collapses what used to be a multi-tool, multi-spreadsheet operation into a single five-minute setup
  
• What AI is actually doing to the shopper journey, and why the data shows less than 10% of consumers who use AI for product research convert through it
  
• The product sampling tool that replaced a spreadsheet-and-email nightmare and why brands are calling it one of the most immediately impactful features they've adopted
  
• How creator content is now serving two parts of the buying funnel at once: driving direct discovery and feeding the LLM recommendations that consumers use to shortlist products
  

The real cost of over-indexing on bottom-funnel partners like coupon and loyalty sites, and how to build a program that serves the full funnel

Stop Running Two Programs and Start Running One

The most persistent mistake Lauryn sees brands making right now is treating creator partnerships and affiliate partnerships as entirely separate disciplines. Separate teams. Separate tech. Separate KPIs. The problem is that the consumer stopped honouring that separation a long time ago.

Modern shoppers discover products on social platforms and creator content, validate them through reviews and community posts, and convert on marketplace pages. Nearly 87% discover products through social platforms, blogs, or community sites before completing their purchase on a marketplace. That journey crosses the traditional affiliate and influencer divide at every stage. When your teams aren't talking to each other, you're not just creating inefficiency, you're creating blind spots in your data that make it impossible to understand what's actually driving revenue.

The answer isn't a bigger team. It's a unified view. Brands that consolidate their creator, affiliate, and marketplace data into one platform are able to see what's working across channels, apply learnings from one to another, and make faster, smarter decisions about where to put budget.

What AI Is Actually Doing to Product Discovery

There's been a lot of noise about AI replacing traditional search and what that means for affiliate traffic. The reality, according to Levanta's own research, is more nuanced and more interesting for performance marketers.

Less than 10% of shoppers who use AI tools for product research actually click the links those tools recommend. The other 90% use AI as a starting point and then go looking for human validation: YouTube reviewers, Reddit threads, blog posts, creator content, community sites. Marketplace reviews come out as the most trusted source at 93.3%, followed by review sites at 90.9%, and YouTube reviewers at 85.9%. AI assistants, at 81.5%, trail all of these. You can download the full data in Levanta's 2026 AI Consumer Insights Report.

What this means practically is that creator content is now doing double duty. It drives direct discovery, and it also feeds the pool of content that LLMs pull from when generating product recommendations. Investing in creator partnerships isn't just a top-of-funnel play anymore. It's infrastructure for AI visibility.

This connects to a wider conversation happening right now about transparency in how brands work with and pay creators. If your program doesn't have clear, documented terms and fair, transparent compensation, you're not just risking compliance issues. You're risking the trust that makes creator content worth anything to begin with. We explored this in detail in The Transparency Gap That Affiliate Managers Can No Longer Ignore and it's worth reading alongside this episode.

Listen to Find Out More About:

• Why the brands most successfully navigating margin pressure in 2026 are the ones who made the move to performance-based creator payments, and how Levanta's paid placements tool makes that contractually clean and practically simple
• The exact range of creator size that tends to deliver the highest trust and engagement with audiences, and why follower count alone is the wrong metric to rely on
• How to structure a creator strategy by testing small (10 to 30 partners) before scaling, and why reverse engineering from your margin is the right place to start
• What affiliate managers need to learn and unlearn when they start working with creators, and why the management mindset required is fundamentally different
• How a product sampling tool that used to require spreadsheets, manual orders, and email chains now takes one click, and what that time saving means for program teams under headcount pressure
• Why 62.3% of consumers purchase within 24 hours of discovering a product through trusted creator content, and what that tells us about where urgency actually lives in the funnel

Key Segments of This Podcast and Where You Can Tune In to Go Direct:

[01:46] What Levanta is, how it was built, and why most affiliate infrastructure was already out of date before the creator economy arrived

[10:24] How consolidating creator and affiliate data into one platform changes the quality of decisions brands can make, with real client context

[22:12] Why treating creator and affiliate as separate strategies is the most common and most costly mistake Lauryn sees, and how to fix it

[26:30] Lauryn's three actionable tips for brands getting their programs ready for 2026:

1. Consolidate your tech stack. Unify your creator, affiliate, and marketplace channels under one program so your team can focus on strategy rather than administration.
2. Invest in top-of-funnel creator content. UGC builds brand trust, drives direct discovery, and increasingly feeds the AI recommendations consumers use to shortlist products.
3. Stay nimble and test often. Whether it's trialling higher commissions for specific creators, experimenting with a hybrid compensation model, or testing a new content format, run short tests, look at the data, and be willing to pivot quickly.

A huge thank you to Lauryn Day for joining us and sharing her insights on where creator and affiliate marketing is heading. If you want to explore what Levanta can do for your program, you can connect with Lauryn directly on LinkedIn or reach out via their website.

Ready to Grow Smarter in 2026?

If this conversation has you thinking about how your program is structured and whether your tech stack is holding you back, the KonverJ Agency works with brands to build performance programs that are built for the full funnel, not just the bottom of it. From affiliate recruitment to creator strategy to program audits, we help teams grow without the guesswork.

Get in touch here and let's talk about what a smarter program looks like for your brand.

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