The creator economy has had such a pervasive impact on many aspects of our lives. Media consumption, for example, has dramatically changed, transforming the way people consume information or entertainment.

So it is in the field of social commerce – where content creators, through digital storefronts, help curate the shopping experience and boost a brand’s engagement with its consumers.

LoudCrowd is a pioneer in this space and has established a foothold by addressing a crucial challenge for premium brands: monetizing creator relationships while maintaining control of the customer experience. 

Through its creator storefront platform, the company enables brands to generate revenue through influencers without compromising their premium positioning or customer relationships.

From Analytics to Commerce: The Company’s Growth

LoudCrowd CEO Gary Garofalo and his team initially focused on measuring earned social media value for brands. “The initial idea was partly to build a model that can quantify everyone’s social earned media value,” he explains. “And once we know everyone’s social media value, the goal is to help brands get more of this earned social, UGC, and customers talking about them.”

The company expanded quickly during this phase, establishing its presence in an emerging market. “Nothing like that had existed,” Gary notes. “Now, if you look at the market, there’s a couple of other companies in that space, like Roster and SocialLadder.”

After three years of operation, the team identified a more significant opportunity. “It was great getting brand advocates to talk more about a brand, creating more content…but we just didn’t feel like it was core enough to a brand’s business,” Gary recalls. “The last leap we wanted to take as a company was to get closer to revenue. We wanted to show these brands that their advocates, influencers, affiliates, and all these folks could drive real value and sales.”

A Distinctive Approach to Social Commerce

LoudCrowd differentiates itself in social commerce by focusing on transaction location. “We are the only company in the world that will allow influencers to sell on your e-comm,” Gary states, adding that this distinction proves essential for brands aiming to maintain their premium positioning and customer relationships.

The entrepreneur identifies three primary social commerce channels, each presenting significant challenges for premium brands. First, TikTok Shop: “If I’m a consumer and I see Alix Earle’s TikTok Shop, I might not even know the brand that made the product. And ultimately what that leads to is the brands can no longer charge a premium.”

The second channel involves external platforms: “The biggest one is LTK. There’s also ShopMy and 20 other smaller ones,” Gary explains. “It’s the same problem for brands. If I am not a discount brand, the customers that buy via Alix Earle on her storefront don’t get any exposure to my brand.”

Gary adds that “non-discount brands” engaged in commerce must own transactions. “That means somebody when somebody is buying something, you want it to happen in your physical store, premium physical store, or e-comm,” he explains. “If a brand makes a TikTok Shop sale, they don’t know the customer’s name or email address. They can never retarget that person. There’s no loyalty marketing or retention marketing.”

Platform Operations and Features

For brands, LoudCrowd constructs one e-commerce page that expands to accommodate thousands of creators. 

“Our JavaScript will allow that to scale to infinite creators,” Gary explains. “LoudCrowd’s platform will manage to turn one e-comm page into potential pages for 20,000 different creators. It’s easy, and it all works out of the box. The brand can make customizations and tweaks on that one e-comm page.”

For creators, the onboarding process delivers immediate value. “When you apply for a program and get accepted, you will receive your storefront,” Gary says. “It’s got your name and profile picture. It’s automatically pulled in all of your social content. It will have default products on there.” He argues that this instant readiness drives creator adoption: “The second you are accepted into a program, you’ve got a supercharged affiliate link personalized to you.”

The platform provides multiple sales channels for creators: “They can share their storefront link, different collections, and different pieces of media tagged with products. There’s a rich experience that allows creators to share whatever they think will sell the best.” Gary highlights the straightforward monetization: “They’re getting paid every single time somebody makes a purchase from their page.”

Data Insights

LoudCrowd’s analytics capabilities provide comprehensive insights while ensuring brands maintain data ownership. 

“It is an important differentiator for us that we can give the brands a lot of data, particularly as our software sits on their website. It’s not LoudCrowd data; it’s all our brands’ data,” Gary points out. “When they drive a sale, it goes into the normal e-comm. So they already are capturing all the data on these purchases.”

The platform measures crucial performance indicators, including sales volume, order metrics, and conversion rates for individual creators. “We can see by creator how many sales, orders, and traffic they drive, the conversion rates for every single creator, etc.,” Gary explains.

Conversion rates emerge as a key performance metric. “Ultimately, there are a bunch of different affiliate solutions out there. Brands choose LoudCrowd because we have a higher conversion rate,” Gary notes. “If you give an affiliate a link to a homepage or a PDP, they’ll sell a little bit. If you give them a link to their custom storefront, they’ll sell a lot more.” 

He notes that the data demonstrates significant improvement: “Us having conversion rate as a core metric shows we drive incremental revenue for the brand. It’s just not another affiliate link. This is incremental revenue. The conversion rate is 7% instead of 1%.”

Creator Success and Platform Growth

The platform also provides detailed analytics on content performance. “We also give the brand analytics on the influencer side of things,” Gary adds. “If you’ve got a hundred influencers, how much content do they create? What are the analytics on all that content? Which is engaging and which is not? You can build reports to see what the content looks like and which is the best content you want to repurpose on your website.”

These insights benefit both brands and creators, Gary explains. Creators receive “any standard influencer or affiliate metric so they can see how many sales they’re driving. They can see what their commissions are going to be, upcoming payouts, and all of their influencer stats.”

Platform Innovation with AI

LoudCrowd continues to enhance its platform capabilities through AI integration. “We’re going to use AI to tag that content with products automatically and have that show up on their storefront,” Gary reveals. “We’re going to use AI to help make that storefront as high converting as possible so the influencer doesn’t have to worry about how to sell every single product.”

Video content presents a significant opportunity in e-commerce. “When you look at companies’ websites such as Nike or Walmart, there are still a lot of images,” Gary notes. “There’s no technological reason that a PDP has nine images and maybe one video; it could be the reverse. We’ll see a real emergence in both social and e-commerce of video taking off because it is more interactive and feels like a more authentic experience.”

Social Commerce on the Rise

Gary believes social commerce has to be “very high on brands’ radar” as “consumer behavior is shifting, and you need to expect a higher percentage of social commerce and affiliate sales in 2025.”

The potential extends beyond sales volume, as the industry vet sees fundamental shifts in brand operations: “I think there’s going to be for on the brand side of things… a continued new world order regarding which brands are successful and which aren’t. You see more and more social-first brands, and they have a real advantage.”

“Social commerce is coming whether you’re ready for it or not,” Gary concludes.