Shopee Fully Opens Affiliate Marketing, Content Traffic Becomes the New Battlefield
According to European Business Magazine, Southeast Asian e-commerce platform Shopee, on the eve of its 9.9 Super Shopping Festival, for the first time opened its “Shopee House” cooperation program to affiliates from all channels. This move marks that Shopee is fully embracing content e-commerce and affiliate marketing, aiming to more efficiently convert off-site content creator traffic into platform sales.
Comprehensive Opening of Traffic Channels: From “On-Site Advertising” to “Omnichannel Seeding”
The full opening of the “Shopee House” program is a major upgrade of Shopee’s traffic strategy. The platform no longer relies only on on-site paid advertising and organic search, but extends its reach into the vast off-site content ecosystem, including bloggers, video creators, and social media influencers of all forms.
By providing them with more convenient cooperation tools and more attractive commissions, Shopee is attempting to build a huge “omnichannel seeding” network.
The core of this strategy is to leverage the trust endorsement and fan stickiness of content creators to “plant the seed” at the front end of consumer decision-making, and then guide the matured purchase intention back to the platform to complete the “harvest” through affiliate links.
Impact on Sellers: New Traffic Opportunities and Challenges
This change brings brand-new opportunities and challenges for sellers:
-
Opening a new blue ocean of traffic
Sellers have the opportunity to reach precise user groups that could not be covered by on-site advertising alone, through cooperation with diverse affiliates, obtaining lower-cost and higher-conversion traffic. -
Higher requirements for product “content strength”
Products need to have enough topicality, visual appeal, or practical value to attract content creators to voluntarily choose and recommend them. Mediocre products will find it difficult to enter the view of affiliates. -
Complexity of cooperation and management
How to select suitable affiliates, how to design attractive cooperation plans, and how to track and evaluate cooperation results all put new demands on sellers’ business development and data analysis capabilities.
Seller Response Strategies and Steps
| Step | Core Operation | Key Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Step 1: Optimize product “content attributes” | Refine the core selling points of the product and transform them into images and video materials suitable for social media dissemination. | Make your product “look like” it deserves to be shared and recommended. |
| Step 2: Actively seek affiliates | Use social media, industry forums, and other channels to proactively search for and contact affiliates whose style matches your product. | Do not wait passively for affiliates to come; only by taking the initiative can you seize the opportunity. |
| Step 3: Provide a clear cooperation package | Prepare cooperation materials including product samples, high-definition assets, core selling points, and commission rates, lowering the threshold for affiliates. | A professional and convenient cooperation process is more likely to win the favor of affiliates. |
| Step 4: Track and optimize performance | Use affiliate marketing tools to track traffic and conversion data from different channels and affiliates, and continuously optimize cooperation strategies. | Tilt the budget toward high-performing affiliates. |
Insights
Shopee’s full embrace of affiliate marketing once again proves the core position of “off-site seeding” in today’s e-commerce environment. Regardless of the platform, sellers who can effectively leverage off-site traffic will gain a significant asymmetric advantage in competition.
To succeed in off-site marketing, the first step is to understand what off-site users care about. The off-site demand research function can aggregate and analyze hot topics, search trends, and user pain points on mainstream platforms such as Google, YouTube, and Instagram.
Through this data, sellers can gain insights into the latest consumption trends and unmet needs, thereby developing products with “viral” potential, or finding marketing angles that highly align with off-site hot topics, so that when affiliates recommend your product, they can achieve twice the result with half the effort.
