How to Use Upfluence to Recruit Creators From Your Customers

The short answer: if your store has thousands of customers, some of them already post for an audience, and Upfluence's Live Capture finds them by checking each buyer or subscriber against its creator database (Live Capture); the platform is sold as a fixed fee on a 12-month minimum (read on 26 October 2026 on the pricing page), so run this job in the trial before you sign. The steps: update your privacy notice, connect the store, run Live Capture over past customers into a list, vet each match, set up a campaign with codes, and pay commissions after a 15-day wait.

Disclosure: I may earn a commission through some links on this site. It does not change what this page says.

Three checks before the first match:

1. Work out what a commission pays on. Upfluence calculates payouts on the sale value without taxes and shipping, with the discount deducted, and counts only orders marked Paid (commission article). For example, a basket of €90 before tax with a €9 code discount and €5 shipping gives €90 - €9 = €81, and a 10% commission pays €8.10.
2. Start from the list you own. Your Shopify customers or Klaviyo subscribers are the search; nothing has to be bought or scraped.
3. Record what each match bought before. Live Capture shows every matched creator's number of purchases, total purchase value and first and last purchase dates. Copy those figures into a sheet as your baseline, so a code's sales can be set against what the same person spent without one.

What you need

• An Upfluence trial, which the team sets up after an initial call, configured for your use case (pricing page).
• A connected Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento or BigCommerce store, or a Klaviyo account (Live Capture).
• A privacy notice that covers the matching, before it runs (step 1).

Step 1: Tell customers before you screen them

Your customers gave you their email address to buy something, not to be checked for social media influence. Article 13(3) of the GDPR requires that people are informed before their data is processed for a purpose other than the one it was collected for (GDPR on EUR-Lex). Add a short section to your privacy notice that names the matching and Upfluence, and tell existing customers about the change before you switch on retroactive analysis. Ask your data protection lead which legal basis applies.

Step 2: Create the Live Capture

Open the Live Capture app, click "+ New Live Capture", name it and choose "Creator Matching" as the capture type (Live Capture). Select the provider, Shopify or Klaviyo, and link a list. Switch on retroactive analysis if you want past customers checked as well as new ones; Shopify customers are analysed in order of creation date (retroactive analysis). Click Save, and from then on every new customer is checked automatically.

Match into a list rather than straight into your community: a creator who was matched once is not matched again unless their profile changes, so the list is your record of who was found. To hear about new matches, toggle on "Live Capture Updates" in My Account > Settings.

Step 3: Read the matches with their purchase history

Open the linked list, then in the Community app use "Manage fields" > "Customer profile" to add number of purchases, total purchase value, first purchase date and last purchase date (Live Capture). Sort by purchases. A creator who has bought four times is a different conversation from one who bought once during a sale.

Step 4: Check brand safety before anyone is invited

Each creator's side panel has a Brand safety tab that scans posts on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube from the past year across four categories, violence, body and nudity, substances, and offensive behaviour, with a Jaice AI summary and the flagged posts underneath (brand safety). Jaice gives a recommendation; a person opens the flagged posts and makes the call, because each category shows the highest risk on any platform, not an average.

Step 5: Set up the campaign with Jaice

On the home page, click "+ New Campaign" and choose the guided setup (Jaice campaign guide). Enter your website and Jaice fills in the brand profile for you to edit. Two choices cannot be changed later: the campaign goals and budget, and the reward type (fixed payment, affiliate commission or product gifting). Attach a tracking plan and decide whether codes and links are created when you approve a creator's application or when you add them. Upfluence advises against linking one tracking plan to several campaigns, because a creator in both would show the same sales twice.

Step 6: Send codes, links and the label rule

In the campaign's email editor, click the tracking-plan bubble and insert the merge fields {{promo_code}} and {{affiliate_link}}; each creator receives their own (codes article). Only creators already in that tracking plan get the email.

Put the disclosure in the same email. The Dutch advertising code for social media requires affiliate posts to be recognisable at once, suggests wording such as "I receive commission on sales", and says the words "affiliate" or "commission" on their own are not enough (RSM).

Step 7: Ask an AI assistant to vet a shortlist

Upfluence runs an MCP server that connects Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor to its creator data, signed in with your Upfluence account; it is in beta, and access is granted on request (MCP article). Paste your ten strongest matches and ask which brands each one has mentioned and whether any are competitors, a check Upfluence lists among its own example prompts. The assistant drafts the comparison; a person reads it against the brand safety tab and decides who gets an invitation.

Step 8: Validate sales, wait, then pay

Read sales in the campaign's Performance tab or the Sales Reporting dashboard, which breaks sales, orders and clicks down by creator. Upfluence recommends waiting at least 15 days before paying for generated sales, to cover the retraction period; then validate each creator's amount due, individually or in bulk, and the creator receives a payment email (commission article).

The trial is part of the sale

Upfluence configures the trial for you after a first call, per the pricing page, so the first people to see how many creators sit in your customer list are the team quoting your 12-month contract. Run the retroactive count yourself during the trial and write the number down before the pricing conversation.

Is the code telling the truth?

A sale with a creator's code counts every buyer who used it, including customers who would have bought anyway. The baseline from the list above is the free check: compare each matched customer's spending in the months before their code with the months after. Later, if you want that check run continuously, a causal attribution tool like Causality Engine does it. Disclosure: I founded it.

The Upfluence glossary entry covers the modules and the contract.

FAQ

Can matching run on newsletter subscribers?

Yes. With Klaviyo connected, Upfluence checks subscriber lists and can push each match back to a Klaviyo list with their Instagram followers, engagement rate and handle (Klaviyo matching).

Will a creator I removed be matched again?

Only if their profile in your database has changed since, or if you run a second retroactive analysis of the same database (retroactive analysis).

Why did a creator not receive their code?

Because they are not in the tracking plan linked to the email. Emails with {{promo_code}} go only to creators who already have a code assigned (codes article).