Meta is playing catch-up to TikTok in the AI and e-commerce game.

At Shoptalk in Las Vegas last month, Meta debuted not only creator affiliate partnership features, but also checkout in its Business AI agent and retail media network product discovery offerings.

The affiliate tools are similar to the affiliate marketing offering that TikTok Shop operates, according to Scott Kramer, head of growth at AS Beauty, which operates a portfolio of brands including Laura Geller Beauty and Cover FX. He said the tools provide opportunities for brands to measure the ROI they’re seeing from creators in terms of who is driving sales, noting it’s a “first step” for Meta.

However, some brands may be slower to adopt affiliate tools, Kevin Simonson, CEO of e-commerce marketing outfit adMixt, said, noting that affiliate offerings lend themselves more so to verticals like beauty and wellness.

“Affiliate, in general, is not as important to most brands as paid. It’s generally an afterthought from a strategy perspective,” Simonson said. “I’m sure some people are obviously getting on it, but as far as brands we work with, I’ve had zero people reach out to me about it.”

Meta’s rollouts come as social media platforms push agents and as they pump out more creator-centric features to vie for creator economy dollars—see some of Google’s announcements at NewFronts, including around creator partnership boost ads. But some advertisers are keeping an eye on how much adoption some of the generative AI–enhanced e-commerce and creator features Meta is rolling out actually see.

As part of the updates, Instagram Reels are now shoppable, and creators can tag products available in Meta’s commerce catalog, along with including URLs including affiliate links (as long as they direct users to one specific eligible item), potentially earning them a commission.

Creators, the company said, will benefit from their product-tagged content being shared to the Partnership Ads Hub in Ads Manager, making those creators more visible to potential brand partners. (Creators will be able to tag a maximum of 30 items per Reel.) Meta plans to test affiliate experiences with Amazon and e-commerce platform Shopee on Instagram in the spring. Facebook affiliate test partners include Amazon, eBay, and Temu in the US, Shopee in Asia, and Mercado Libre in Latin America.

The company is taking a slightly different approach to affiliate partnerships for Facebook. Creators can tag products in Facebook photo posts and Reels, which will display an affiliate banner. Users can click on that content to be directed to the product on the brand’s app or site, potentially earning the creator a commission. Amazon and Shopee are serving as launch partners for Facebook, with Temu, eBay, and Mercado Libre set to join in the near future.

Cha-ching: Meta is introducing a new checkout offering in its Business AI sales agent, which Meta first announced that it was integrating into ads at Shoptalk last year. PayPal and Stripe have signed on as launch partners, with Shopify and fintech platform Adyen to come. It’s likely an effort to simplify checkout and reduce friction to more efficiently drive consumers to increase conversion rates, Simonson said. The company is also testing an AI offering that will surface information relevant to a potential purchase, like discounts and product recommendations.

That’s not all: Meta is also augmenting product discovery in ads by surfacing additional information in particular for retail media networks. It’s testing product set optimization, which would empower retail media networks to choose which products to promote and would provide them with campaign product-level data. A retail media network could run a campaign for a specific product offered by a beauty brand partner, for example, rather than allocating the brand partner’s budget toward advertising its whole catalog.

It’s also seeking to improve product discovery for brands by bringing its product showcase offering to Reels and Stories. Brands can input their own creative, which Meta AI may use to place catalog products in a carousel if the system deems it could boost performance.

The feature could be valuable for brands using potentially less effective alternatives to optimize catalog ads, Simonson said. “If we’re talking about a crawl-walk-run strategy as it relates to catalog…these new product features are ‘run,’” he said.

But some brands are still in the “crawl” stage in terms of their catalog strategy, he added.