Shopify is rolling out its Collabs offer further with a debut in the UK following its original launch last year. It connects Shopify merchants with content creators, helping those creators and brands “collaborate and find new revenue streams”, enabling them to “kick-start affiliate relationships together instantly and get paid faster”.

In its pilot phase in Britain, it has already seen a creator like TikTok and Instagram star Isabelle Kate growing, while a brand such as French Connection has been working with creators to connect to new customers.

It’s a way for Shopify and its many customers to make the most of the accelerating creator economy and to see those creators moving from side hustles to fully-fledged businesses.

Shopify said that only 4% of creators globally are able to go professional, and Collabs “will enable more people to turn their passion into a full-time business and achieve economic independence”. 

So how does it work? The new tool makes it easier to discover brands and establish partnerships, such as beauty specialists working with emerging make-up brands for their ‘Get Ready With Me’ videos by sharing affiliate links that their followers can use to get discounts directly for products they’re using. 

Meanwhile brands can discover creators and manage their relationships with them, while also having “a new way to connect with highly engaged consumers, through trusted creators, at a time when acquiring customers has never been more difficult and expensive”.

Brands need to install Collabs and make their store and products discoverable, then creators can join that brand’s community, after which Shopify Collabs can be used to manage the relationship, “supplying creators with everything they need like unique links or discount codes, and enabling them to share the merchant’s products with their engaged audiences”. 

Instead of manually finding and vetting creators to partner with, brands can set a commission on products (all products or on the collection level) and these offers will be automatically shown to all verified Collabs creators in the app. Commissions can be set to auto-pay, which are only due after a sale has been made. 

Brands can also track which creators are driving the most sales while the latter can also see which products their followers are buying, “allowing them to deepen their strongest partnerships if they choose”. 

The entire process is managed centrally from the Shopify admin, “which means inventory, order, and customer information are kept up to date, giving a real-time view of the merchant’s entire multichannel sales”.