No major retail media player has taken as circumspect an approach to advertising revenue as Shopify.
As the payment processor and site infrastructure for so many online sellers, and with the greatest supply of such first-party data outside of Amazon and Walmart, Shopify holds a unique key for some of the biggest ad platforms.
Initially, the company forged data partnerships with other big platforms so they might target and attribute based on its data – but blindly, with no retargetable ID. Then, Shopify created addressable audience segments and used its data science to create audience segments for other platforms.
In the past quarter, the company has taken its next important step with a product called Campaign Autopilot, Samir Pradhan, Shopify VP of product for merchant marketing, told AdExchanger.
Unsurprisingly, it’s an agentic, AI-driven optimization product. Akin to how other walled garden AI ad products work, merchants set the price they’re willing to pay per sale, including some further controls, such as having a higher incentive for new customers or being able to target by region or time of day.
The current Campaign Autopilot partner platforms are Meta, Microsoft Advertising and Snapchat, with X in the pipeline, Pradhan said. Email marketing and ads on Shop, the Shopify-owned app that aggregates its merchant network, are also available.
And in the past few weeks, the company has added SEO optimization to Campaign Autopilot, he said. “That is our first foray, so to speak, outside of ads toward this broader vision of helping automate more of a merchant marketing.”
(“We don’t currently have the open web,” though. Womp.)
The easy-to-activate advertising solution is important to new merchants, according to Pradhan. Sometimes an ecommerce seller is an expert in one or more channels. But often the entire category is unfamiliar. Small sellers (businesses of one or a few people) aren’t going to hire pro marketers, but they understand the importance of advertising as a core competency.
Campaign Autopilot is a “risk-free ad product,” Pradhan said.
Other big ecommerce marketplaces and retailer or merchant platforms all charge per impression and/or for clicks. They might optimize toward a sale, he said, but it’s not what you actually buy. With Autopilot, though, “Shopify takes that media risk,” he said. The merchant only pays per sale.
There are other guardrails, too, he said. For instance, a campaign can be capped (which sounds commonsensical but has painfully surprised many ecommerce advertisers on other platforms) or an entire channel avoided. And Shopify is working on more “domain-specific controls” (contextual advertising, in other words) for advertisers who want to fine-tune their own campaigns.
Some merchants are sophisticated marketers who’ve honed their own models; others have never spent a dollar on advertising. Pradhan said the idea is to meet a “a broad swath of what marketers try to do from a guardrail perspective.”
Even for veteran ecommerce marketers, though, the industry overhaul to agentic and AI-based ad platforms has happened quickly. For Shopify, he said, “preserving that merchant trust and then making them feel in control was a big part of the ethos of developing this product.”
