Condé Nast became the first major publisher in the Shop app’s curation program, with editors from its brands, including Vogue, GQ, Architectural Digest, Allure, Condé Nast Traveler, and Glamour, putting together weekly product collections for the app and Shop.com.
The program lets creators and publishers build shoppable collections of products from Shopify merchants and earn commissions on their recommendations. Until now, it only featured picks from individual creators and brands, but now big publishers are entering the scene.
Here’s how it works:
- Condé Nast editors pick products for weekly collections in the Shop app and on Shop.com. Every product has to be sold through Shopify.
- Through its own publication, newsletters, and social media, Condé Nast also sends readers to Shop to check out its editor picks.
- When shoppers buy, Condé Nast earns commissions on those sales, plus performance-based incentives.
A few Condé Nast collections are live now, with more expected to arrive in early November, and Condé Nast and Shop are already discussing expanding the deal to more of its titles.
I used to make a healthy living by ranking buyer guides and product comparison posts on Google and earning a commission from my recommendations. However, I saw the writing on the wall around 2020 that AI was about to consume the whole web, digest expert commentary, and spit out the information as its own answer, so I moved away from the model. That’s not to say that affiliate marketing isn’t thriving in 2026, which it is, just that the model of primarily relying on Google organic traffic has had its day.
What I see now is major platforms bringing affiliate content in-house — such as with Amazon Influencer Storefronts, Shopify’s curation program, and of course, TikTok Shop’s affiliate program. Platforms don’t just want your external links sending traffic to them anymore. They want the content itself. Shopify’s partnership with Condé Nast is a perfect example of that.
