The economics of creator commerce agencies have never been particularly complicated. An agency takes on a roster of brands, runs paid amplification and affiliate recruitment across all of them, and accepts that most accounts will underperform while a handful carry the portfolio. It is a numbers business, and at sufficient scale it works.
But a structural problem has emerged underneath it, and the data makes the problem hard to ignore. TikTok Shop’s US business reached $15.1 billion in GMV in 2025, up 68% year on year, according to Momentum Works. The same analysis counted roughly 803,500 US stores — of which more than half recorded no sales at all. Only 2,143 cleared $1 million; 135 cleared $10 million.
That distribution has produced a services market that is now visibly splitting.
Two models
The volume model is well capitalised and well documented. MediaLabs reports over $500 million in managed GMV across more than 3,000 creators. 5x Dashboard claims $43 million in client GMV for 2025 and holds all four of TikTok’s partner certifications. Sellery was the first US partner to generate $1 million in GMV from livestream for a single brand. These firms are category-agnostic by design — beauty, supplements, home, apparel — and their advantage is operational scale and platform relationships.
The vertical model is smaller and newer. Thrive Creators, which works almost exclusively with food, cooking and homesteading creators, is one of the clearer examples of the approach: rather than managing ad accounts across categories, the firm operates a narrower stack — TikTok Shop management, affiliate programme operation, cookbook publishing, and physical product sourcing — for a single creator type.
The bet is that in a category where the product is physical and the audience relationship is instructional, depth compounds in a way breadth does not.
Why food and homeware rewards specialisation
The consumer shift underneath this niche is not aesthetic. It shows up in purchase data.
Instacart recorded bread flour orders up 49% and wheat berry purchases up 17%, attributing the movement to home baking and self-sufficiency behaviour. Tractor Supply’s 2026 Homesteading Report found that 86% of surveyed US adults said grocery prices had influenced their interest in producing their own food; 57% bake from scratch and 42% preserve food. Cast iron cookware sales at Target and Walmart rose 30% to 40% over an eighteen-month period, according to The Barcode Group.
Publishing tracked it. Circana reported baking cookbook unit sales up more than 80% in 2025 — over 800,000 titles in twelve months — against a wider cookbook category that has been flat to declining for years.
What makes this category structurally different from, say, beauty is the tightness of the fit between content and product. A creator who bakes on camera weekly has an obvious adjacency in bread trays, slicers, aprons and pantry goods. The audience arrived to learn a skill, which makes it a commercial relationship before anything is sold. Firms operating in this lane — Thrive Creators among them — build around that sequence rather than around campaign management.
The cookbook as infrastructure
The specialist approach treats cookbook publishing as an acquisition mechanism rather than a revenue line, and the logic is sound.
A cookbook converts a rented platform audience into an owned customer file — a name, an address, and a stated interest. It establishes authority in a defined culinary lane. And it creates the product adjacency that makes a physical range coherent rather than opportunistic.
Where the vertical agencies differentiate is in what follows. Publishing a book is now largely commoditised. Sourcing several thousand units of a carbon steel tray from an overseas manufacturer, managing duty treatment and landed cost, and holding inventory in US fulfilment while preserving a margin that survives a 15% affiliate commission is a different discipline entirely — and it sits outside what a generalist ad agency is built to do. Thrive Creators handles sourcing directly, which is the clearest structural departure from the volume model.
Affiliates, not ad spend
A consistent finding across operators in this category is that paid budget is not the growth constraint most brands assume.
On a well-run TikTok Shop account, affiliate-generated video typically accounts for around two-thirds of GMV. Paid amplification tools like GMV Max do not create demand — they scale creative that already exists. Where only a handful of affiliates are posting, additional budget has nothing to amplify. The binding constraint is content supply.
That reorders where a specialist agency puts its operational weight: affiliate recruitment, creator onboarding, sample logistics and commission design, rather than campaign management. Commission structures across the category sit at 15–20% of affiliate sales, pushed to 30% or higher on hero products.
It also introduces the category’s defining fragility. Where a single creator accounts for more than half of affiliate GMV, the programme is a dependency rather than a programme. Building second and third anchor creators before the first churns is, in practical terms, the core operational job.
Where launches fail
Three failure modes recur, and none of them are about audience size.
Unit economics modelled after the purchase order. A product carrying a 22% gross margin cannot absorb a 15% affiliate commission plus paid amplification. That arithmetic has to be settled before a container is committed. Harvard Business Review’s work on product launches attributes the largest share of failures to inadequate preparation rather than absent demand.
Products with no relationship to the content. CB Insights’ 2026 analysis found 42% of startup failures came down to building something that solved no real problem. In creator commerce the equivalent is a SKU with no connection to why the audience follows — a sourdough creator selling skincare is starting a conversation the audience did not sign up for.
No attribution. Shopify’s conversion rate metric excludes TikTok Shop orders entirely; TikTok Shop orders also mask customer data through platform fulfilment. An operator reading TikTok performance in Shopify analytics is reading a number that means nothing. Most creator brands cannot say which video drove which sale, which makes every subsequent budget decision guesswork.
The category ahead
The consumer trend looks durable. Grocery inflation, genuine appetite for analogue domestic skills, and a platform that rewards demonstrable physical products are not a passing configuration.
But the concentration data cuts both ways. The channel produced 1,785 creators clearing $1 million in GMV in 2025 — more than triple the 529 who managed it the previous year — while leaving several hundred thousand storefronts at zero. The gap between those groups is rarely audience size. It is almost always operations, and that is the wager the vertical specialists are making.
