Shopify opens Shop Campaigns to all merchants in US & CA

Shopify made Shop Campaigns available to all of merchants in the US and Canada, an advertising tool that was previously only available to Shopify Plus merchants. I covered this briefly in story #1, but it's such big news, I wanted to go into more details as a headline story. 

What is Shop Campaigns?

Shop Campaigns are advertising campaigns run through Shopify that target users within the Shop App. 

Shopify describes them as “risk-free campaigns across platforms and borders to drive customer growth with Shop.”

1. Merchants only pay for conversions, when new or existing customers convert.
2. Shopify takes care of optimizing the creative, audience, and ad placements without the merchant having to create new assets.
3. Merchants choose which shoppers to target, such as New Customers only or Lapsed Customers who haven't shopped at their store in a while, and then they get access to the customer's data once they convert so that merchants can “own the customer” from there on out.
4. Merchants need to set a minimum budget that is equivalent to one order per day. So if a brand's customer acquisition cost is $50, then the minimum budget needs to be $50.

To clarify one thing — Shop Campaigns aren't driving traffic to the merchant's store, but rather, to their products and storefront within the Shop App. However once the customer makes a purchase through Shop App, they become part of the merchant's customer database and e-mail / SMS list (if they opt-in). 

Shopify President Harley Finkelstein posted on LinkedIn: 

“Shop Campaigns is now available on all plans in the US and Canada. This means even more merchants can run risk-free acquisition campaigns on platforms like Shop, Google, and Meta, targeting new and lapsed customers with incentives in the Shop app. We just expanded Shop Campaigns to Google Shopping too.”

I'm very excited about this update. Leveraging Shop Campaigns has been one of my most highly sought after channels for non-Plus merchants, and I've already started running campaigns on some stores. I'll let you know how they go!