Quick Summary
When a brand wants to reach a new audience, it often partners with creators in the target niche. Staying connected with one or a few creators is manageable for brands. However, managing multiple creator partnerships can quickly become chaotic. Shopify Collabs simplifies the process of managing creators for businesses.
Shopify Collabs provides merchants with a central hub to discover creators, set up affiliate programs, track performance, and manage payouts. Creators also benefit from the platform, as it simplifies applying to brands, accessing affiliate links, and earning commissions.
In this blog, we’ll shed light on how Shopify Collabs works, how to use it, and much more. But first, let’s explore what this platform is.
Shopify Collabs is Shopify’s built-in creator partnership platform designed to help brands and influencers collaborate more efficiently. Merchants can discover creators, send products and gifts, manage affiliate programs, track sales driven by influencers, and automate payouts—all from one dashboard.
For creators, Shopify Collabs offers a simple way to apply to brands and receive products. Plus, they can generate affiliate links and monitor their earnings more efficiently.
All in all, Shopify Collabs connects merchants and creators through a centralized, trackable system. It reduces the manual work of managing influencer partnerships. So both sides benefit from transparent, performance-driven collaborations.
Shopify Collabs is designed for both merchants and creators. It offers a streamlined platform for running influencer partnerships.
Collabs is well-suited for large Shopify stores trying to grow their business through creator marketing. With this platform, they can easily find creators, manage gifting, and run affiliate programs. Additionally, they can track program results without needing to juggle multiple analytics tools.
Influencers, bloggers, YouTubers, and social media influencers find it suitable to partner with brands. They can receive products and earn commissions when people buy using their links.
Overall, Collabs is suitable for brands trying to leverage social commerce for selling their products. Influencers looking to get affiliate income through promotion would also benefit from this transparent yet performance-driven approach.
Shopify Collabs connects merchants and creators through a centralized workflow. It handles discovery, collaboration setup, tracking, and payouts. Here’s how it works.
A brand installs the Shopify Collabs app on its Shopify store dashboard. Then they can set commission rates, prepare gifting options, and define collaboration requirements (eligibility).
Creators can apply to work with the brand through the network, or they can be invited by the merchants directly.
Once approved, creators receive product gifts (if offered) from the brand. They also get affiliate unique links and discount codes to promote the brand.
Creators promote the brand by sharing content, like blog posts, videos, and reviews, through their personalized links to drive traffic and sales.
With Collabs, Shopify tracks the clicks, conversions, and orders from different creator links. Moreover, commissions are recorded in real-time, providing transparency to both parties.
Finally, creators are automatically paid their dues through integrated payment channels. So there’s no need for manual follow-ups.
Shopify Collabs helps businesses and creators manage influencer marketing. That is, everything from creator discovery to payments. It keeps the approach measurable and efficient.
For business owners, Shopify Collabs is a scalable, in-house platform for influencer marketing. It can be integrated directly into your Shopify dashboard.
By executing this procedure correctly, brands and businesses can have higher sales and better brand awareness. Plus, user-generated content (UGC) created by creators helps brands build trust, authority, and recognition.
With Shopify Collabs, creators get access to thousands of Shopify-based stores trying to leverage influencer marketing for their products. They can find partnerships, get approved, and earn commissions from a single dashboard.
Creators can treat Shopify Collabs as a curated marketplace for finding authentic affiliate opportunities. They get paid to share what they like with their audience.
Collabs offers a range of features that create a powerful, closed-loop ecosystem. Let’s look at them one by one.
Shopify Collabs features a curated creator discovery tool. Merchants can search for the right creator according to their:
It showcases verified creator data, so brands can find affiliates who genuinely align with their market. They don’t have to be necessarily big creators–just the right one for the product.
Merchants can set custom commission rates, generate unique links, and assign discount codes in no time. The real benefit of this platform lies in Shopify’s real-time attribution system. It ensures accurate tracking of clicks, conversions, and revenue. It’s the solution to common issues like lost referrals.
Collabs simplifies product seeding. Merchants can offer specific items for creators to claim. Your store’s inventory is automatically synced with this platform, and the shipping is tracked end-to-end. That eliminates the messy spreadsheets and manual DMs usually required for gifting campaigns.
The dashboard provides clear insights into creator performance. Who is the top earner? What are their total sales? What are their conversion rates and campaign ROI?
It’s native to Shopify, so the data is highly accurate and directly tied to store orders. It gives brands the dependable visibility into what’s driving sales.
Unlike standalone influencer tools, Collabs is built directly into the Shopify ecosystem. So the products, inventory, orders, shipping, and payouts are all synced automatically. This reduces manual work and gives both merchants and creators a single source of truth for every collaboration.
These features make Shopify Collabs a practical, efficient, and transparent tool for managing influencer partnerships at scale. However, you also need it to be well-integrated with Shopify, as well as other necessary tools. To achieve this, utilize our Shopify integration services for optimal results.
Collabs is a part of influencer marketing, which is a critical and potentially expensive strategy. So, merchants need to be vigilant about the best practices and strategies to achieve the best results.
A creator with 10k highly-engaged followers in your exact niche will drive more sales than one with 100k disinterested followers. An authentic connection always beats a broad reach.
What to Do?
Your commission is your key incentive. It must be competitive enough to attract quality creators while ensuring your business remains profitable.
What to Do?
Send free products to the creators to make it an enticing deal. Rather than a cost, it’s an investment in high-quality, authentic marketing content. Good user-generated content is a path to valuable creator relationships.
What to Do?
Offer the creators the tools they need to succeed with influencer marketing. Strike a balance between clear brand guidelines and the creative freedom to be authentic.
What to Do?
Use Collabs’ analytics to identify which creators are actually driving sales, not just clicks. Invest more in these proven partnerships to maximize your returns.
What to Do?
Shopify Collabs automates the tedious task of tracking and paying commissions. Leverage this to build trust through transparency. That makes your program more attractive and professional.
What to Do?
These strategies help brands build scalable, high-performing creator partnerships using Shopify Collabs.
And if you want to tailor the platform in a way that ensures the best influencer marketing, hire dedicated Shopify developers. They can add the right features and design elements for this strategy.
Even with the best implementation, there are a few potential challenges you may encounter with Shopify Collabs. We also discuss the simple fixes for them.
Many merchants struggle to identify creators whose audience reflects their ideal customer. This leads to low conversions even when creators have high follower counts.
Quick Fixes
Some creators accept gifts but don’t always produce content. It’s often due to unclear expectations or a lack of excitement about the products.
Quick Fixes
If creators use incorrect links or promote outside tracked channels, performance data becomes incomplete. It affects commissions and decision-making.
Quick Fixes
Payment-related issues can break trust with creators, especially when commissions appear incorrect or payouts take too long.
Quick Fixes
Managing creator relationships manually becomes overwhelming as the program grows. It leads to inconsistent communication and missed opportunities.
Quick Fixes
Creators sometimes produce content that doesn’t match brand standards or fails to communicate key product benefits.
Quick Fixes
These fixes help merchants overcome common obstacles and get more consistent, high-quality results from Shopify Collabs.
Let’s discuss a few of the top brands using Shopify Collabs successfully to invite creators to promote the Shopify store.
Solgaard sells premium lifestyle goods like travel gear and more. It is one of the best examples of sustainable eCommerce, in that it uses plastics cleaned from the oceans in its fabrics. Where it shines through is cleaning around 6 pounds of plastic from coastal areas for every purchase.
This kind of revolutionary business model and thought process needs to be promoted far and wide. Solgaard needed an ambassador program paired with influencer marketing. That’s where Shopify Collabs came in.
Collabs helped find influencers for the Shopify store across social platforms like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and more. It expanded Solgaard’s reach and growth in the community.
Plus, with the Affiliate Tiers feature, they customized and distributed the discount codes and referral links for ambassadors. So Solgaard and its creators can offer deals to the followers and earn commissions from sales.
The Result
With Collabs successfully managing the affiliates, Solgaard experienced an MoM revenue growth of over 250% and $50k in sales in 2022.
Marie Grew started Moonboon to offer high-quality sleep accessories for babies. It’s aimed at sustainability through organic materials. And the designs are inspired by the moon, deep sleep, nighttime, sweet dreams, etc., to promote comfort for the little ones.
What Moonboon experienced was a rise in marketing costs while finding new, targeted ways to reach new customers. By itself, starting a creator program was a bit too challenging and time-consuming.
But with Shopify Collabs, it became easier for Moonboon to find new influencers for their community. With this platform, they built positive relationships with the creators through affiliate links, discount codes, and commissions.
The Result
Thanks to Shopify Collabs and its efficient creator program, Moonboon has had a whopping $1M+ in affiliate sales with over 300 creators. And the average ROI now stands at 6.5X.
Lalo is a D2C baby and toddler brand selling multifunctional products with lasting value for the families. With their eCommerce website, Lalo wanted to sell its growing collection of baby products while also building authentic connections with the customers.
But for explosive growth, they also wanted to create brand awareness. So they decided to partner with creators and influencers and build a network of affiliates promoting their brand. That’s where Shopify Collabs came in with an all-in-one solution. Lalo could find influencers and run a successful affiliate program, all from a single platform.
The Result
Using Shopify Collabs for affiliate marketing, Lalo has seen 3X sales within the first 3 months. With better brand awareness, the average order value (AOV) also increased by 16%.
Simply put, Shopify Collabs is the bridge between Shopify stores and creators. Brands can find the right creators, partner with them as affiliates, and measure their performance with clear analytics.
As for the creators, Collabs is a way to discover and apply to brands for affiliation through unique links or discount codes. They can also track their earnings and manage their collaborations on a simple dashboard.
So, do you want assistance with Collabs and other meaningful integrations for your eStore? Then connect with us today!
Yes, brands can install the Shopify Collabs app for free from the Shopify App Store. They only pay the commission fees to creators on sales they generate.
Shopify Collabs automates payouts. You set the terms, and the platform tracks sales and pays creators directly, usually via the integrated payment channel. The commission cost is deducted from your store’s payout.
Yes! The built-in gifting feature lets you send products directly from your inventory to creators without leaving the app, making it easy to seed products for reviews.
Yes, absolutely. Shopify Collabs has a built-in analytics dashboard that shows you all the key metrics you need. You can easily see the total sales and revenue, your top-performing creators, click and conversions (from each affiliate), and commissions.
Creators can browse and search for brands directly within the Shopify Collabs network. They can use the Discover feed to find brands by category (like fashion, beauty, home goods, etc.). After finding the right brand, they can apply for its program directly through Collabs platform with a single click.
Ankur is a highly experienced E-commerce Platform Expert dedicated to maximizing the online potential of businesses. His deep knowledge spans across leading platforms, including Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce, among many others. Ankur specializes in guiding companies to effectively leverage these technologies and their capabilities to drive significant growth and success for their online ventures.
