A new company is looking to streamline social commerce — and has set its sights on beauty to do so.
VideoShops, a business cofounded by Abra Potkin and Nicole Winnaman, started with the goal of solving pain points in affiliate retail for creators. The result is a marketplace with 250,000 products, a plethora of brands and same-day payment for participating creators.
“Creators need to be approved by brands to have their content monetized with single-product links, and they don’t even get paid the same day,” Winnaman said. “We built a platform that lets any brand create their own creator network by turning shoppers into sellers in under five minutes. It allows brands to pay anyone who influences a sale, and it allows anybody to shop or sell any product in our marketplace.”
VideoShops is an evolution of traditional affiliate retail, where consumers can simply link out to their own VideoShops storefronts on existing social platforms and gain same-day commissions on products sold. The brands are the merchants of record and handle fulfillment. “We’re the aggregator,” Winnaman said. “We’re seeing nanoinfluencers, people under 5,000 followers, doing thousands of dollars in sales a month.”
The platform gives brands access to those shoppers-turned-sellers. “You have a personal, single link, you share that single link when you post a video of, say, doing your morning routine, and then it goes straight to your storefront. Every other platform redirects to the brand to transact, but this makes it so everyone has influence. It’s all fair game.”
Potkin reasoned that the platform also helps brands better measure influencers’ conversion rates. “Brands say to us a lot of the time that they don’t know if paying a big influencer has moved the needle for them,” she said. “With VideoShops, they don’t pay influencers until they see a sale. It’s low-risk and high-reward.”
A handful of businesses are cracking the code to social commerce, most notably, TikTok Shop. Statista data indicates that the social commerce market in the U.S. reached north of $75 billion in 2023, with expectations for it to hit $141 billion by 2028.
The business launched in the back half of 2024 and has onboarded E-Cosmetics, Hear Me Raw, Relevant: Your Skin Seen among other beauty brands.
On the creator side, they’ve already seen aestheticians and makeup artists join. The goal is to capitalize on a groundswell of consumer interest in beauty, too. “You really want to lean into sharing with your friends, and you can target any demographic. It’s personal and they’re products you love,” Potkin said. “For brands that can’t sustain going into retail, they’re able to tap into that megaphone.”
The company has also attracted investment from the likes of Marc Lore, Dick Costolo and Alex Rodriguez.
“As an investor, I seek out companies that disrupt the status quo and solve problems. VideoShops breaks down barriers for creators and brands, making it easier than ever to turn passion into profit,” the athlete-turned-businessman told WWD in an email. “Abra and Nicole have created a platform that’s reshaping the future of commerce.”
Potkin and Winnaman are taking VideoShops on a tour of college campuses next month that the latter has called “our money-making tour,” she said, with eyes on social-savvy generations to bolster its creator network.
“If you have a phone, you have a business,” she continued. “If I’m walking down the street and you say you love my sweater or glasses, I can show you my QR code and they’re shopping in seconds. Now, the mission is to onboard as many brands as we can across every category.”
