Affiliate strategies

We recommend that you check out the Growth Center for resources to increase your referral revenue and make it easier to market to your audience.

Content development strategies

Create original content as a Shopify merchant

Become an authority on commerce by being a Shopify merchant yourself. As a Shopify merchant, you can speak authentically about your experience and offer your audience real-life examples and insight into how you got started. Sharing your experiences can help them fast-track their store launch, be set up for long-term success, and avoid common mistakes.

Use pre-developed content from Shopify Growth Center

Check out the Growth Center’s guides and playbooks for lists of high-performing content you can link to or draw inspiration from. Subscribe to the Growth Center emails for tips on key topics to cover, pre-developed content, and product announcements to help keep your content up to date.

Develop engaging multimedia content

Video guides, tutorials, courses and vlogs can offer your audience instruction on how to launch and grow their business. You can create the following content:

Online course, video or webinar with instructions to help your audience start their free trial by walking them through the steps to get started.
Training material about entrepreneurship, commerce and Shopify-specific topics to help your audience launch and grow their own business.
Video content on Youtube, to educate your viewers on how to set up a Shopify store, launch an ecommerce business, or find a product to sell online.
Webinars to share live-demo’s or Q&A sessions to help your audience learn about Shopify and encourage them to follow your steps to launch their free store trial with your live instruction.

Tailor content to fit your audience's interests

Determine what topics and ways to sell resonate best with your audience, and determine what content formats, calls to action and topics are most likely to result in conversions. Engage a more targeted audience and speak to the use cases of ‘why Shopify’ in your content to help entrepreneurs understand how it supports their business needs.

Experiment with content variations to optimize convversions

Try split testing different Shopify properties to optimize the sign up rate of your referrals. Not all landing pages engage your users in the same way. The Growth Center guides highlight the highest converting landing pages by audience type.

Traffic and audience engagement strategies

Increase referral traffic

To make more referrals you can:

Promote Shopify in high traffic placements on various channels, such as your blog, social media (YouTube, Facebook, etc), email etc.
Develop your key channels and sources to continue building an engaged audience you can market effectively to.
Experiment with your paid marketing strategy to drive traffic to your highest performing content sources where you promote Shopify.
Link to Shopify’s pre-recorded dropshipping and print-on-demand webinars to increase your conversion rate.

Maintain engagement through re-marketing

Re-market to your audience by email after they’ve taken your course, attended your webinar, or downloaded your guide to support them even after they signed up for their free Shopify trial. Offer additional content and guidance on how to launch their business.

FAQ

Usage of Shopify content guidelines

All of your content must be your own. Promoting any content that isn't your own can result in affiliate partnership termination. However, you can reference Shopify’s content in the Growth Center for ideas on how to promote to your audience.

Accessing Shopify graphics and creative assets

In the Growth Center’s creative library, there are over 4,000 up-to-date assets available in different formats and in 14 languages for you to use in your marketing.

You can also create your own custom banners and material to promote Shopify, but make sure to follow the brand guidelines when working with Shopify imagery and logos. You can use promotional phrases like "Try it free today" in your graphics to increase your click-throughs and conversions.

Multiple landing pages for referral traffic

To direct your audience to multiple different landing pages, log into your Impact account and select Content from the navigation bar, then click Assets. Select Text Link from the bar at the top, and filter by label to find the right landing page for your audience.

If you want to create a new referral link, then go to your Dashboard and navigate to Create a Link on the left hand side of the page. Enter a specific landing page URL and select Create. If you don't specify a landing page URL, then your referral link will automatically direct traffic to the default Free Trial landing page. Once created, simply copy and paste to your site.

Where to send international referral traffic

All of our international Shopify domains are eligible to receive referral traffic. For example, if your audience is based in Brazil, then send them to https://www.shopify.com.br/avaliacao-gratuita instead of the English domain https://www.shopify.com/free-trial.

You can use any of the following international Shopify domains:

www.shopify.com
www.shopify.ca
www.shopify.co.uk
www.shopify.in
www.shopify.com.au
www.shopify.co.id
www.shopify.com.br
www.shopify.co.nz
www.shopify.co.za
www.shopify.com.ng
www.shopify.com.ph
www.shopify.com.sg
www.shopify.hk
en.shopify.hk
www.shopify.ie
en.shopify.be
www.shopify.my
en.shopify.dk
en.shopify.no
es.shopify.com
www.shopify.es
www.shopify.com.co
www.shopify.com.mx
www.shopify.fr
fr.shopify.ca
fr.shopify.be
www.shopify.nl
www.shopify.be
www.shopify.jp
www.shopify.tw
www.shopify.de
de.shopify.be
it.shopify.com
www.shopify.dk
www.shopify.co.kr
www.shopify.se
zh.shopify.com
www.shopify.net.vn

Stay updated with Shopify announcements and programs

You can subscribe to the Growth Center newsletter series to receive frequent updates, new resources, and information about topics that can help you earn more as a Shopify affiliate. You can also find key product announcements by visiting the Shopify newsroom.

Contributing feedback on Shopify Affiliate programming

You can complete the Growth Center feedback survey to let us know what you need to market Shopify.