Understanding Affiliate Find Creators

Overview

The Find creators module in AfterShip Affiliate helps you discover, evaluate, and organize TikTok Shop creators for affiliate partnerships, all in one place. It has three core sub-features that simplify and scale your creator marketing workflow, from discovery to campaign launch:

• Describe a creator: An AI-driven search with advanced filtering to find relevant creators from a 5M+ creators database, using simple, natural language.

• Similar creator: Scale your outreach by identifying creators similar to your top-performing partners.

• Creator lists: Organize, import, and manage the creator lists for more efficient outreach and campaign planning.

What you’ll learn

In this guide, you will know about:

• Use Describe a creator to find creators
• Use ‘Similar creator’ to scale creator discovery
• Organize creators using Creator lists

1. How to create a list?
2. Manage Creator lists
3. Using Creator Lists for outreach

1. Use Describe a creator to find creators

Describe a creator is an AI-powered tool that helps you find the right TikTok Shop creators for your brands using simple, natural language queries and/or structured filters. Just describe the creators you want in simple English, and the system will find matching ones from a database within seconds.

It works using AfterShip's industry-leading AI tagging system that understands and automatically classifies creators by over 50 dimensions, including:

• Creators demographics
• Content style
• Audience traits
• Commerce performance and more.

How to use Describe a creator

Step 1: Enter your search query

1. Go to Affiliates > Find creators. 
2. Click Describe a creator.
3. In the search bar, describe the type of creators you are looking for.

You can also include multiple conditions in one query, such as creators' attributes, content style, audience traits, commerce metrics, etc. 

Example queries/searches:

• Female beauty creators, GMV over 100, Follower count over 20,000
• Spanish creators with kids and GMV > $1000
• Skincare fast-talking creators
• Black wellness advocates who create humorous content
• Mom with GMV>100, sell kids' product well

The system will automatically interpret your query and show relevant results.

Step 2: Refine results with filters

After your initial search, you can narrow down results using filters. 

• Click More filters (Top-right of the search bar).

Filters are grouped into three main categories:

1. General filters

2. Industry filters

3. Commerce filters

Step 3: Evaluate creators from the list

The search result appears as a creator list. It includes each creator’s key info, including avatar, handle, followers, average video views, engagement rate, post rate, commission rate, GMV, and their top 4 videos by view count. 

You can click any video thumbnail to preview videos directly and assess content quality.

Step 4: Take action

Once you find relevant creators, you can:

• Add to list: Save relevant customers (individual or multiple) to a Creator’s list for future use.
• Export: Export selected creators' data, such as handle, GMV, email, etc., to CSV format.

Search tips for better results

• Use specific and descriptive language for your queries. The AI can understand complex, multi-attribute descriptions.
• Combine Describe a creator with filters for the most precise results. For example, search skincare tutorial creators and then filter by GMV > $500 and Follower count > 10K.

2. Use Similar creator to scale creator discovery

A similar creator helps find creators similar to your existing best-performing ones. Instead of searching from scratch, Similar Creator will analyze your existing creators as a base and discover more creators with similar traits who can convert well for your brand. This helps you scale creators outreach.

How to use Similar creator?

Step 1: Add Seed creators

1. Go to Affiliates > Find creators.
2. Switch to Similar creator.

“Seed” your ideal creators who performed well for your brand to find more of. Use any of the following input methods: 

• Search & add (Manual): Search for the creators name or handle in the search box and add them one by one. 
• Paste creator handles: Copy the list of creator handles from a spreadsheet and paste them directly into the field provided. Separate handles by line breaks or commas. 
• CSV upload: Create a CSV file containing all creator handles and upload it. Click the attachments icon to upload a .csv file. 

Input limits:

• Max 1000 creators per CSV file, and the file size limit is 2MB.
• Can process max 2,000 seed creators. If you provide more, the system will process the first 2,000 and notify you.
• Unmatched creator handles are listed in a “match failed” report after processing.

Step 2: Choose a similarity type/direction

Before you click Search, select the similarity type that the system should prioritize to find creators:

• Comprehensive/Overall (Default): “Overall” is selected by default. Continue, if you want to search considering all attributes – content style, commerce performance, and audience demographics, in a balanced way. 
• Content similarity: If you want to focus on the creator's persona, content niche, tone, and presentation style, priortize by Content. This is ideal for branding campaigns where the creator’s consistent voice is the key. 
• Commercial similarity: To match creators based on sales performance metrics like GMV, engagement rate, and items sold, priortize by Performance. This works best for performance-driven campaigns.
• Audience similarity: Priortize by Followers to match with followers' demographics such as age, gender, and target audience fit. 

Step 3: Review results

After the system process “seeds”, it will generate:

• A Similarity summary that explains shared traits of the seed creators and the basis for the creator recommendations. For eg, “Your seed creators are predominantly female English-speaking beauty creators with GMV between $5K–$20K targeting 25–34 year-old women”.
• Result list showing similar creators and sorted by relevance.
• Each creators card shows key info, including avatar, handle, followers, average video views, engagement rate, post rate, commission rate, GMV, and their top 4 videos by view count. Also, results are labelled by the similarity level: high, medium, or low. 

Step 4: Refine and export

• The Similar creator result list has a Filter panel. Apply additional filters to narrow results further.
• You can also perform actions like ‘Add to List’ and ‘Export’ the creators list (same as in Describe a creator).

3. Organize creators using Creator lists

What are Creator lists?

Creator Lists help you organize creators into groups and manage them for different campaigns, outreach waves, or planning. The list acts as a bridge between discovery and final action (collaboration outreach/email campaigns).

How to create a list?

There are two ways to create Creator lists:

Method 1: Save from Find creators

After using Describe a creator or Similar creator search:

1. Select the creators (or select all).
2. Click Add to list.
3. Enter a list name and confirm. You can also choose an existing list.

The system saves all selected creators in the new list, regardless of the total count. The list type is automatically labeled as “Magic search” or “Lookalike” based on its source.

Method 2: Import via CSV

1. Navigate to Affiliates > Creator lists.
2. Click Import creators.
3. Upload a CSV file containing all creator handles (use the template provided).

The system processes all entries where matched creators are added with full profiles, while unmatched handles are reported. 

Note: 

• File size limit: 10MB
• Large imports with more than 1,000 creators are processed asynchronously, and you’ll be notified once the import is complete.

Manage Creator lists

List overview page

In the creator lists page, you can see all lists with the following info:

• List name
• Total creators
• Source type (Magic search/Lookalike/CSV import)
• Created by
• Created date 

Here, you can rename or delete any lists.  

List detail page

Click any list name to see all the creators in the list. It is displayed in the same card format as Find Creators results. Inside the detail page, you can: 

• Search within the list by creator name or email.
• Sort creators by GMV or engagement rate.
• Remove individual creators from the list.
• Export all creators to CSV.
• Launch Collaboration: Directly initiate outreach for the creators in this list.

Add creators to an existing list

While browsing creator search results, you can add creators to any existing list using the Add to List option. 

1. Select creators from the search result.
2. Click Add to list > Choose an existing list. 

Using Creator Lists for outreach

When launching a collaboration campaign:

1. Choose “Select from list” in the Select creators step.
2. Pick your list, and it will show all matched creators in the list.
3. Confirm selection. 

All matched creators will be added to your outreach campaign, and unmatched creators are skipped automatically.

Key takeaways

• Find Creators helps you discover, evaluate, organize, and prepare creators for outreach.
• Three core tools that power the system are: Describe a creator, Similar creator, and Creator lists.
• Describe a creator is an AI-powered discovery tool that lets you find creators using simple, natural language, along with advanced filtering.
• Similar creator helps you scale creators outreach. You can use existing top-performing creators to automatically find similar ones for expansion.
• Creator lists save, organize creators, and manage them in a group, and can be instantly used to launch collaboration campaigns.

Updated on: 29/04/2026