Shopify Collabs

How To Use Shopify Collabs

Shopify Collabs is available on all Shopify plans except for the Starter and Retail plans. 

You can install it for free, directly from the Shopify App Store.

Complete your profile, including:

• Brand details (including images of your products and your brand values)

• Partnership information (this is where you can tell creators about working with your brand, and what they can expect from the partnership)

• Connect your social media accounts - this will let creators review the type of content that you publish and learn more about your brand

• To find the creators that are most relevant to you, you need to set a target market. When you join the Collabs Network, your target market is used to help connect you with creators in a market that matches

• Profile visibility - you can do this one of two ways:

1 - Collabs Network: Join the Collabs Network to instantly share your products with vetted creators who can sell your products.

2 - Online store page: Add your Collabs profile to your Shopify store to give your customers the opportunity to collaborate.

A bit more detail about the two options for increasing your profile visibility. You can browse the influencer database to find and recruit creators who align with your brand, or you can use your Shopify Collabs online store page to share details about your program with creators and brand fans and to collect applications. 

You can customise the content on your online store page to match your brand, and set up survey questions to get to know your applicants before accepting them into your program.

As mentioned, you can also join the Collabs Network to work with Collabs-vetted creators on an affiliate level. To opt in, you set a commission rate on either all products or at the collection level, which allows products to be displayed to creators in their discovery experience. Creators can search for your products and can save and generate product links without the need for approval. This is great as it allows creators to begin sharing links and generating sales instantly.

Send program invites with perks and gifts, and share your products with the Collabs creator network. Once it’s set up, the app will largely run itself - you can set up auto-payments and If you are eligible to use Shopify Flow, then you can integrate Shopify Collabs, and automate your Collabs process.

Once it’s all up and running, it’s key to track performance - create and track unique discount codes and referral links so you can easily measure affiliate performance and monitor product sales.

What Are The Benefits Of Shopify Collabs?

Benefits for Merchants

It’s easy to collect applications and recruit collaborators with your own custom creator application page. Collabs streamlines creator identification, simplifying hiring and collaboration directly on the platform. It generates tailored insights for campaign optimisation and sets performance metrics, offering unique links and discount codes for multiple creators.

You can get it up and running quickly and start to generate sales by instantly sharing commission offers with the Collabs Network.

Customise affiliate offers by using personalised links & codes for your creators.

It’s straightforward to manage - you don’t have to use spreadsheets to keep track of what’s happening in Collabs - you can send and track gifts through Shopify.

Save time by tracking and paying commissions automatically via your Shopify bill.

You can expand your own audience by tapping into your collaborators’ audiences - with creators across lots of industries like food, fashion, travel, and design, there’s bound to be a collaborator that will be a good fit with your brand to enhance your visibility, drive traffic to your website, and boost sales.

Streamlined payments via PayPal make it quick and easy for merchants and partners. Shopify Collabs simplifies affiliate management with an overview of affiliate sales, auto-commission calculations, and direct payments.

Marketing campaigns - connect quickly with influencers who discuss your brand, products, and industry, for successful campaigns that boost brand reach and sales.

You get great insights and data from the app - it generates tailored insights for campaign optimisation and sets performance metrics, offering unique links and discount codes for multiple creators. Fully integrated with Shopify admin, Collabs provides a comprehensive sales funnel overview, covering customer database, orders, and inventory.

Benefits for Influencers

Shopify Collabs App doesn’t just benefit store owners though - it offers a beneficial partnership opportunity to creators as well. It lets them choose brands that fit with their own ethos and values, and share with their own audience. Collabs lets creators secure quality brand partnerships, enhance their portfolio, and earn more money. 

Creators can connect with more than a million merchants. At the time of writing, Shopify is the ecommerce platform for 2,404,674 live websites which means creators gain access to a huge portfolio of potential brand partnerships. 

Product seeding is a great way to engage with creators with a smaller audience, motivating them to create the kind of content that will connect with their audience. Shopify Collabs enables merchants to collaborate with creators by offering gifts, samples, and promotional items.

Collaborators can also earn affiliate-based commissions. This lets store owners define their own commission structures and keep track of sales within the app.

The comprehensive dashboard helps creators to keep track of activity and earnings, providing analytics for tracking earnings, payments, performance, and other key elements of collabs activity.

Brands That Use Shopify Collabs

Immi

Immi is a ramen brand that wanted to build a community of creators who loved their food. Shopify Collabs was the perfect tool to enable them to do this. The brand connected with over 400 creators who became brand ambassadors, and through these relationships, in 18 months 4,400 orders were placed, generating over $200k in affiliate sales. Interestingly, the brand didn’t connect with creators that had huge audiences - they used a lot of smaller influencers with under 10k followers. It’s not always about the number of followers - often, it’s about creator and brand alignment.

Duradry

This deodorant brand was keen to experiment with new marketing tactics to find new customers, without spending lots of money on paid media. Shopify Collabs allowed them to work with creators who loved the products and could act as authentic ambassadors for them. They were able to reduce their customer acquisition costs by 29% in 7 months, while generating $50k in sales through their community of 250 members.

Moonboom

This business sells sustainable sleep accessories for infants. They used Shopify Collabs to build a community of creators who are highly engaged and passionate about the products, to help spread the word and grow the brand’s audience. With over 300 creators in the community, over a million dollars of affiliate sales have been generated.

How To Find Creators To Work With On Shopify Collabs

Being successful on Shopify Collabs can incorporate both outbound and inbound approaches.

Outbound

Shopify Collabs features a great influencer search tool that does a job as good as other influencer search platforms. You can perform searches for collaborators based on the following criteria:

• By social network, via search parameters using keywords, hashtags, location etc.

• By follower count, engagement stats like views or likes.

• Take a look at the social accounts of the collaborators you shortlist - make sure that their content aligns with your brand and that you can imagine them promoting your products and working alongside you.

• Once you find a creator you’d like to approach, you can access their contact details in the Info tab which will allow you to make contact with them.

Inbound

Shopify Collabs also offers the option to create a recruitment page. You can then add this to your website to act as a Brand Ambassador landing page. Influencers can then find this and apply to be recruited as part of your Collab community.

An easy way to manage this is to share the link to your application page with influencers through direct messages, and all the applicants can be conveniently managed in the Applicant tab within the influencer search tool.

Tips for Creating Strong Shopify Collabs Partnerships

We would advise that you select collaborators based on their alignment to your brand (and if you’re creator, select brands that align with your own values). You’ll get better results if you target real enthusiasts and genuine fans of your brand. To connect with their audience their content has to look real, and that can only be achieved if they are being original and genuine. 

Be clear about the objectives - in order to create successful working relationships, both parties must have clearly defined objectives for the collaboration. This makes it much easier to quantify what success looks like as agreeing certain goals such as sales, engagement or audience growth pushes the relationship in the right direction. 

Encourage your influencer partners to promote your products so that you can repurpose this content later on your own social channels. According to the Marketing Rule of 7, a potential customer needs to see a brand's marketing message at least seven times before they will make a purchase, so the more times you can repeat the message and get it in front of people, the better.

Managing Creator Collaborations

Long-term relationships will pay dividends. If possible, don’t let partnerships end once a specific campaign or project is finished. As well as helping build a reliable base of collaborators and influencers, it makes it easier to work with people you’ve worked with already, and also helps create a faithful audience for your brand.

Incentivise your best influencers to continue to work with you and to put extra effort into the relationship. It could be things like allowing early access to new products, or invites to launches or events.

When you send your collaborators your products, package them well, send them on time and include a personal note where possible to express your appreciation. Also send them any supporting material that will be useful to help them promote your products effectively.

Keep track of results and progress through analytics to ensure the partnership is doing what you need it to do. Track campaigns through UTMs or discount codes to determine how the relationship is impacting engagement levels, click-throughs, and sales.

Make sure your communication is clear and helpful. Ensure your ambassadors have everything they need in terms of support, or if if they need anything else to be successful.

Shopify Collabs FAQs

Which merchants are eligible for Shopify Collabs?

Shopify Collabs is great for: big and small brands who want to create their own affiliate marketing program.

It is available for merchants on all Shopify plans except for the Starter and Retail plans. 

How much does Shopify Collabs cost?

Shopify Collabs is free to install and is available from the Shopify App Store. (It’s worth bearing in mind that a 2.9% commission processing fee on automatic payments may apply.)

Are there any drawbacks to Shopify Collabs?

Shopify Collabs does have a few limitations, including restricted payment options to PayPal, the lack of a multi-language translation feature, and limited customisation options.

Some creators may find Shopify Collabs less appealing due to a relatively lengthy and complex sign-up process, some initial interface issues and software glitches, and a lot of competition within the creator community.

How does Shopify Collabs handle payments and commissions?

Purchases and commissions are managed through PayPal. The commissions that are due are automatically tracked by Shopify Collabs and then distributed to the collaborator. You can track all payments through the dashboard.