Shopify is slowly but surely making its way into the ads business.
An earlier step in that journey was the hiring of Samir Pradhan as VP of product for merchant marketing in November 2025.
There is no product called “Merchant Marketing,” as Pradhan told AdExchanger. But merchant marketing is the way the company thinks about its nascent media and data business, which serves, optimizes and attributes campaigns on behalf of Shopify site owners.
Shopify truly does have a different approach with its data and ad targeting business. For one thing, the company generally eschews the CPM-based business model that is typical for other retail and payment data sellers. In other words, the platform will enable partners such as Google and Meta to convert far more effectively on Shopify sites, but takes no cut of the lucrative ad value it generates, nor does Shopify take a commission or percent of sales generated by the ads.
For Shopify, the point is to provide that product to merchant clients, often for free, to help anchor its product as their overall ecommerce infrastructure.
This dynamic “actually keeps the product very pure,” said Pradhan, who previously was VP of ads monetization product at Pinterest and a Google PM before that, so this isn’t his first ad platform rodeo.
Channel partners may be happy with Shopify’s ad tech business model, which is not an ad tech business at all because it takes no CPM, he said. “But we’re really doing it fully in service of what’s best for [merchants], and so I think that keeps the product kind of noble in its intention to serve merchants.”
Merchant first
As one example of Shopify’s laissez-faire approach to ad monetization, last week the company introduced an in-platform tool called Campaign Autopilot that vastly simplifies the setup process for a Shopify merchant to start advertising. The agent manages spend across Shopify’s own platforms, email marketing and Meta Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC), which are the most highly automated platform ad products out there.
Pradhan referred to products like Google’s Performance Max and ASC as “AI-driven campaigns” or “automated campaign types.”
“Let’s just call it that, right?” he proffered, since there is no handy acronym to describe the particular type of platform campaign that is steered almost entirely by the platform’s AI tech.
In Shopify’s case, the Campaign Autopilot product works within the merchant’s own Meta or Google accounts. Shopify’s Campaign Autopilot is meant to allocate budgets across different channels and control budgets based on what the merchant is willing to spend. And Shopify will unlock additional channels, too, for the Autopilot agent.
The other automated or AI-driven ad products are all internally facing, Pradhan said. Google’s PMax is not good at optimizing Meta, or vice versa. Shopify’s plan is to span these platforms and allocate spend across them more fluidly and more effectively, Pradhan said.
And to that end, Shopify is also adding new ad demand channel partners for Shop Campaigns, its general ad serving product – ChatGPT and Pinterest join Google, Meta, Snap, TikTok and Bing. And Microsoft Monetize, the former AppNexus SSP, is also now an advertising partner for serving ads across the open web. Pradhan cited ChatGPT, Microsoft Advertising and Snap as partners in the pipeline right now for the Campaign Autopilot feature.
Adding in the open web will be a valuable growth opportunity for merchants, too, Pradhan said. Again, Shopify doesn’t earn a cut of the CPM or sales (unless it’s the payment processor), but merchants have been clamoring for new pools of potential customer beyond the familiar walled gardens.
“We find so many merchants basically telling us that they are spending on ads today and they don’t see the return,” Pradhan said. “This is our attempt to basically say, ‘We can drive more out of that.’”
