Shop's new agentic search, Posts, and retail integration
Also on YouTube: https://youtu.be/bgrJVYiDQKc
"If I don't see that purple button at checkout, bye-bye." That's what Shop's buyers tell Kenny Cohen, and it's a clue to why Shop has quietly become one of the most valuable channels a Shopify merchant has.
Kenny runs product for Shop, and in this spring edition he walks Kurt through three updates. Agentic Shop Search now understands a buyer's taste from their real purchase history, not generic web guesses. Posts let you auto cross-post your Instagram reels into a feed where people actually came to shop. And a new retail integration lets buyers check local inventory and start a return in the app to finish it in store.
The throughline: Shop already has hundreds of millions of buyers interacting with your brand for free, mostly through order tracking. The merchants who win are the ones who show up with Posts and a dialed-in storefront instead of leaving that attention on the table.
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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.
Kurt:
This episode is brought to you in part by Swym. Here's the thing about wishlist apps. Most of them just sit there. A customer saves a product and then nothing happens. Swim actually activates that data. When someone wishlists a product, you can trigger price drop or back in stock alerts and feed that intent directly into Klaviyo or your CRM. You're not guessing what people want because they've told you. Plus, customers can share wishlists for gifts and your team can view them to offer personalized service online or in store. And unlike cart abandonment, wishlist data is permission-based. These are people raising their hand saying, "Hey, I want this, just not right now." Swim's been around for over a decade. It powers 45,000 stores and installs in about 5 minutes. You could try it for free today at getswim.com/kurt. That's G-E-T-S-W-Y-M.com/kurt. Today in our Editions Spring 2026 series, we continue our deep dives on Shopify feature updates. And joining us to tell us about what's new with Shop is Director of Product for Shop, Kenny Cohen. Kenny, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
Kenny:
Yeah, thanks for having me. Great to be here.
Kurt:
The big one we want to know, give me the high-level overview. What is new with Shop?
Kenny:
There's so much new. There's so much dropping all the time. But the big thing that we're most excited for, for this edition is Shop Search. Shop Search is becoming the most personalized shopping assistant, period. Built around your buyer profile, built around everything we've kind of gathered about your interests and intent around using Shop Pay, where you shop, the brands you like. And really creating the best and most personalized shopping search experience around that. So that's the big thing launching. But we're also announcing some cool stuff with retail, new tools for merchants. But I would say Agentic Search and Shop Search is one of the most exciting drops.
Kurt:
So for people who don't know, remind me, redefine for us, reintroduce Shop to us.
Kenny:
Yeah, it's a good question. Shop, Shop is Shopify's consumer brand. Right. And I would say you can kind of anchor your understanding around some of our hero products and it will kind of give you a sense for what Shop is. But the two products that probably come most to mind for people are Shop Pay, aka that purple button at checkout, and, and Track with Shop. Shop is basically our opportunity to say, hey, how can we accelerate growth for brands who choose Shopify by reducing friction and things like checkout, by saying like, hey, I actually I don't want to fill out a form every time I do this, you know, every time I go to pay, or I really don't want to like create an account all over the place. I kind of want like one convenient account and merchants benefit from that, you know, reduction in friction. And the other side of this is like, hey, Shopify contains some of the greatest direct-to-consumer brands on the internet. Like it's awesome if we could have an app where you could discover those brands, connect with them, shop from them in one place, and of course track your orders. It all started with like an order tracking thing there, but over time it's really evolved into end-to-end personalized discovery in a single app. And that's what we've been focused on for quite a while now. So it's, it's really this kind of like ecosystem of features, some of them in the app, some across online stores that, um, are based around again, that unified buyer identity.
Kurt:
It's funny, you said, hey, like we're doing these things to reduce friction. It is amazing to me how often people say like, I'm disappointed when I get on, I go to make a purchase online and it's not Shopify because I don't want to bother with their checkout. Like just that Shop Pay is so convenient and I get it. I feel the same way.
Kenny:
Yeah. I mean, it's one of the greatest things that we hear and probably the most frequent thing we hear in our customer interviews is basically like, if I don't see that purple button at checkout, like, bye-bye. I think someone posted, someone posted a tweet of like the guy ejecting out of a rocket ship that's like, You know, when I don't see Shop Pay at checkout, like that's how I feel. And like, we love, we love hearing that. Obviously, I think that's, that's awesome. And that's what it's all about. And it really does come back to like, that's helping merchants win. Like it means that when you're picking Shop Pay as a payment method at checkout, as a merchant that like you're bringing some credibility, reduction in friction and that familiarity to buyers on the other side. It's super important.
Kurt:
How long— Shop app, I want to talk about. How long has it been around?
Kenny:
Uh, about 6 years, I think, is when it was officially announced. It's actually an interesting kind of like origin story. Started as, uh, 2 separate products. It was Shop Pay, which really started as Shopify Pay, which was a checkbox at checkout that was to remember you. So you'd be like, remember my information for next time. It was a very humble app biz project actually. And then the other product was called Arrive, which was the package tracking app. Um, because it was such a common issue for merchants handling inbound around like, where is my order?
Kurt:
Yeah, where's my order? You get that one.
Kenny:
Yeah. So we basically built the like, where is my order app? And both of those things grew independently and eventually it was like, hey, these are both like buyer-facing products. What if we merge them? And that became Shop and, you know, evolved into many, many beautiful things since then. But around 6 years ago, I think, is when it came together.
Kurt:
So since you have to make these product decisions, this is just kind of interesting. Shop's interesting because It has two audiences, the merchant on one side and then the customer on the other. I assume that that's true of a lot of Shopify's products, but they just, I feel it the most with Shop. How, how do you optimize for those two audiences?
Kenny:
Yeah, it's a good question. It's one we, we get a lot and I, I think it's kind of this, uh, false dichotomy kind of to some extent, but really like We're part of Shopify. We're here to help merchants win first and foremost. And we do that vis-à-vis building amazing buyer experiences. And I think the two really go hand in hand, but I would say at the end of the day, we're here to help merchants win and help elevate their brand. Like in shop, there's just many decisions where like many marketplaces and many, many places that you, platforms where you discover online, you could go all the way through the funnel and realize like, I don't know who I just bought from. Who is this brand? And you look and it's like 7 consonants or something. And Shop takes a different tact. Like, we want you to build a relationship with the brand that you're buying from. And so you'll scroll through our home experience and we call it window shopping because we want it to feel like a peer into the great brands that are on Shopify. So we're really a platform that helps celebrate great merchants, great brands who tell great stories. And then yes, obviously build frictionless buyer experiences on top of those to enable discovery, purchase, repurchase.
Kurt:
So it sounds like a core goal here of Shop App, of that experience for a customer is discoverability. And if I'm the merchant, I, you know, for me, the outcome is I want to be discovered, you know, bring me new, new eyeballs, new customers. It sounds like Agentic Search is, you know, the big feature that can help with that, I think. Tell me about it.
Kenny:
Yeah, so we've had a search product for, for a few years now. So that part of it isn't new. This is really— Agentic Search is really just an evolution shop search. And what we realized is that, you know, a lot of times you're looking for something and you don't even necessarily have the words to describe it. It's like, you know, you take a picture of a thing, of a part in your garage or something, and it's like, I don't even know what this is, but I think I need a new one. Or, you know, I— we were just talking, I just had a kid recently, and it's kind of like navigating all these experiences where I am totally clueless on what to buy, and I want something that's kind of, um, can help me, guide me through that search process. And the Agentic experience is really great for that. It's great for handling things when you don't quite have the words to describe what you need. It can help you do things like finding gifts for people in your family, for people you love. And, um, Shop Search basically isn't just this kind of, you know, standard chat interface. It's really built for shopping. Um, it's really built to say like, hey, ultimately at the end of this, we want to help you research and compare products to solve what you're solving for your needs that you're looking for. Looking for in this moment, but then also over a longer span of time learn about you and kind of deepen our relationship with you and get more and more personalized shopping experience through time. So, you know, it's, it's for those more complicated use cases, but really it's just also like a more efficient way to search because it's highly personalized. Um, that's kind of the core of it.
Kurt:
Walk me through an example. I'd like Like what you said, it makes sense. It sounds great, but it's abstract. Let's talk through, let's talk through an example. My wife's birthday's coming up. I gotta get her a gift. So I would open shop and say, hey, I need a birthday gift idea for my wife. And you know, she loves Barbie and you know, she's a Barbie collector. Like something to that effect. Give me any, help me out.
Kenny:
Yeah. So I want to talk about kind of what's under the hood of this because it's, it's really important. So. Um, you're basically looking for a gift for your partner and you kind of have, uh, maybe you've actually bought for them before, meaning maybe you've shopped, you know, some stuff for yourself or your, your studio, your office and everything, right? But then you've actually made other purchases in the past that were kind of deviated from your standard profile. We're starting to understand like, hey, you know, you might buy for yourself, but you also have a wife and maybe kids. And our understanding of you as a buyer is actually that robust. So we can actually say, hey, We see that you've bought for your wife before. So when you actually enter that search, we'll be like, hey, yeah, you know, you said she was into Barbie or something. It's like, yeah, we see that, like, you've searched for Barbie things in the past or bought them in the past. Like, like, does she want to build upon her collection or something like this? Like, does she need the new dollhouse or whatever it is? Or does she want something from the movie that launched a couple of years ago? Right. So it's actually saying, you know, this isn't the first time that we've talked about this before. It's going to trace back to our understanding of you as a buyer, even those personas of people that you often buy for, and tailor the experience around that. Right. In terms of what happens in terms of, you know, finding products, we're using our great search, we're using our understanding of merchants' products, the taxonomy features of those products to best match buyers with, you know, things that match their query. Right.
Kurt:
So it sounds like, you know, the magic here, because I could You know, realistically, I could do a Google search, my alternative, I could do a Google search, I could ask ChatGPT. But what's different about your solution is it's leveraging first-party data that it already knows about me, and that improves relevance.
Kenny:
Yeah. And that, that what ties all the way back into Shop Pay and these kind of ecosystem of products. We have Shop Pay, Sign In with Shop as well, for those that have seen that. And that's where we're kind of understanding your intents as a buyer. We're seeing where you're shopping, what you're actually buying., and ultimately that funnels down into this, uh, kind of single understanding of you as a buyer. And Shop's personalized search is great because of that, right? Um, I think that's really what differentiates it and what will make it an amazing shopping experience for buyers.
Kurt:
This is cool. So, all right, it knows— it has my purchase history, like whether or not I did that in Shop app. Like I made those purchases with Shop Pay on Shopify stores, but it still knows it.
Kenny:
Correct.
Kurt:
So, okay, cool.
Kenny:
So we're able to see like, hey, purchases that you've made with Shop Pay, where you're signing in, what you're browsing, and you know, when you're signed in on, on online storefronts, and able to stitch that together and build like a pretty robust understanding of you as a buyer. You pair that along with, um, you know, your interactions as a buyer inside of Shop, who you follow, the products that you save and like, um, and it builds a pretty good understanding of who you are at the Brands that you love, your style, your overall vibe. And I think many search products kind of like lack, you know, fail to capture this vibe concept of like, you know, you search for new clothes and it's like, yeah, these are like technically, you know, white t-shirts, but they're not from the brands that I would ever buy. And we're trying to basically remove those hops to like, how do you actually search for something that matches the vibe of who you are as a buyer? And that, that vibe, that taste thing is a very hard thing to encode in kind of just pure taxonomy of products, right? It's not about like, yeah, it's technically, you know, the white heavyweight thick t-shirt or whatever. It's like, that's, uh, there's like a cultural element here that I think we're trying to get to, to say, um, we can understand these brands that you love to shop for as a buyer, the taste and interest that you have and what that might lead to in terms of the features that you think are important in the products that you're, you're So the difficult, the very difficult part here is you're trying to teach a computer to make some very subjective decisions.
Kurt:
It's not easy. And then to really complicate it, because you want to play this on hard mode, you've got just a, a massive dataset, a huge catalog to go through. I can't conceive of how it works. Like, you must be proud of this because I played with it. It does work. It does exactly what you say. How, what, how did you pull this off?
Kenny:
Years. I think part of the answer is like, we've been in the game for a long time working on things around product taxonomy and understanding, um, understanding our products, understanding the features of our products. Like, this is not like a, hey, you know, Model X launched recently and therefore this all magical thing, all, you know, appeared. It's been years of work building towards search products, building towards recommendation systems and understanding those products. And then. Really years of building deep relationships with our buyers, um, and building their trust to understand and shape kind of this personalized experience. Um, and by the way, I think that, you know, we're talking a lot about how, uh, this shapes the agented search product within, uh, Shop Search. But something else that's actually launching in additions is sign-in with Shop on the Catalog API as well, which I think is quite cool because it basically says like you can build on top of Shopify's catalog of products enable users to sign in with Shop and actually get a similar, like, personalized experience. And again, it speaks to this, like, Shop is, you know, you might think of Shop app as the place, the single destination, but it's also this distributed experience that's improving discovery products and discovery experiences wherever, you know, buyers are meeting the products from these great brands.
Kurt:
And so other recommendation tools could pull, could use the same search and then surface, you know, it, it my Shopify products from my store potentially.
Kenny:
Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that's exactly what the Catalog API is enabling, which is so cool. Cause you think about how hard as a developer, like I've tried to build apps like years ago, that was like commerce marketplace, like commerce discovery and search apps. And like, there was never a single endpoint that was just like, hey, can I just have the products from the internet please? Like that didn't really exist. You know what I mean? And the Catalog API makes that possible. And then the Catalog API plus Shop makes it possible to, you know, leverage the hundreds of millions of recognized buyers that we have as a part of Shop and build personalized search experiences, you know, anywhere, which is just so cool. Like, it's so much easier to build these new search experiences.
Kurt:
Support for this episode comes from Zipify, makers of ShopRank. Consider this: AI may be hiding your Shopify store. And you wouldn't even know it. Today, more than 800 people use large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini to shop for their products, and those AI engines are deciding who to recommend. The question is whether they're picking you or your competitor. The trouble that most Shopify stores have errors they may not be aware of: missing alt text, weak descriptions, JSON schema that is simply wrong. AI sees those errors and moves on without a second thought. And there goes the sale. Now you can do something about it. ShopRank checks your product catalog against 17 critical factors that can keep you from appearing in AI search. But unlike other audit tools, which only tell you what's broken, ShopRank fixes it for you. Automatically. No tech skills required. ShopRank gives you your store's AI visibility score in under 60 seconds, and then helps you improve it. For free. You can see your AI score right now by visiting zippify.com/ai. Zipify.com/ai. Do take a moment to do this today before AI gives away any more of your sales. All right. I love the idea. I want, I want to participate. If I'm a Shopify merchant, how do I, how do I make sure that my products are included in these potential results? And then really, you know, how's it, how's it deciding what to surface?
Kenny:
Yeah. I'm going to honestly, it's one of those things where, um, to get started is very simple. Like we are, we've already done most of the hard work in terms of like labeling the products and making sure that we understand, uh, understand your products and their features. But, um, you can see there's a new kind of like agency channels part of the admin of Shopify. So you can go check that out and kind of see how your products are appearing, see the search terms that you are or are ranking for and kind of improve your performance there. That space is early. It's going to get better through time for sure. Um, but, but the beautiful thing is like the vast majority of merchants on Shopify are already in shop and discoverable through Agenic Search, uh, and through Shop Search right now. So, um, the answer is not a whole lot in terms of what merchants need to do to get started.
Kurt:
Does it— am I, am I in it by default? And where do I go just to, if I want to make sure, how do I verify it?
Kenny:
Yeah. So. Uh, Shopify merchants are basically in the broader catalog largely by default, and Shop consumes that catalog. So by default you're on, um, you can go to the Agentic Channels, uh, kind of sales channel inside of admin and check out your placement. And then Shop channel, so the Shop app channel is a separate app that you can install and kind of personalize your storefront, um, update the branding, merchandising of your storefront on Shop. And make sure that the presence looks great and matches your brand. So we've, uh, in editions past we've done a lot of work there. We actually have something else launching in this edition, which is posts, um, where you can go into Shop Channel and basically syndicate or, you know, post content to your, uh, followers or people who love your brand on Shop app as well. So that's another thing dropping.
Kurt:
Yeah, you mentioned, you know, a, a big difference in your view for how, if you're thinking of Shop in comparison to marketplaces, is that retail experience, you know, making it surfacing the individual brand experience to the customer through this marketplace. Other places we don't see that. Shop app, that is a priority for you. And Posts seems like that is supporting that. Tell me about Posts. Like in plain terms, is this— am I syndicating a blog post? Is it text? Am I posting portrait videos? What do I got here?
Kenny:
So you can, you can basically— we know brands are producing great content across media platforms, social platforms all over the place. So we're trying to make it really easy for brands to, you know, cross-post content that they're already creating into Shop. And it's really about storytelling about your brand, about your products, why you made them, why you think they're great for buyers. And it helps again, bring some richness and depth to the buyer experience. We're trying to help buyers understand who they're buying from. We're trying to help them learn about the products and really fall in love with products. And sometimes it's hard to do that when you just look at, you know, a little square ratio thing of, you know, a great pair of shoes. It's like there's only so much that you can do there as a buyer. It's like, are these for me? Like, what's the vibe kind of thing? So, um, you can basically post videos, uh, and into posts. That's what they are. And then you can also connect to Instagram and actually automatically cross-post, um, Instagram as well.
Kurt:
That's really convenient because that's where this content's getting posted to begin with anyway. And so if I could cross-post it into the app, into Shop, excellent. You know, we're really extending, you know, the storytelling we could do as the brand inside Shop. That, that's cool. That's powerful.
Kenny:
100%. And again, it just helps bring your brand to life. Like you can only do so much vis-à-vis looking at, you know, flat products. I think it's a great buyer experience and we're seeing really good results from brands that have adopted it early. So that's great to see.
Kurt:
Okay. The, the other additions, uh, announcements that we've gone over as part of the series are retail updates and retail. It's getting faster. It's got new features. Shop, uh, does it have any tie-ins to retail, to POS?
Kenny:
Yeah, there's a lot of great work happening to kind of better integrate the retail experience into Shop. I think this is another good example where it's really about the ecosystem and how it all works together and is unified. I think unification is doing that, doing those kind of like boring things right, where like, you know, if you have retail locations set up properly now in Shopify's admin, now when you're shopping in the shop app on the product detail page, you actually see real-time availability of products connected to those retail locations. So just one of those basics, like it all just kind of talks to each other and works together really well, things that, now actually is going to work. And the other big thing is related to the order tracking experience, which is returns. So now you can actually go into the Shop app, initiate a return, choose a drop-off location that's nearby you, show up to the store, open the Shop app, scan a QR code at POS, and, and go on your way. And it's just a better experience for, you know, people working at the store, better experience for you as a buyer to find that, like, you know what, I actually can just, like, Go to the store and drop this off. And again, it creates that real-world connection between buyers and brands that shop.
Kurt:
Yeah.
Kenny:
Well, wow. Right.
Kurt:
If I'm the customer, you know, me personally, but, uh, I'm sure other people feel the same way. I don't want to have to mail my return back if I don't have to. I would prefer to go do it in store if I can. And you having this and the way it's been set up and making it accessible to really retailers of any size. Incredible because of the level of professionalism I can add and offer now by using this system, as opposed to in the past, this would be a much bigger, more difficult, more expensive thing to implement that might exclude smaller retailers. Here it's just going to work. I think that's, that's great.
Kenny:
The buyer experience is just like so seamless. There's just this beautiful thing of just like, I don't want to do the exchange of like, where's the order number? I don't know. It's just like everything is kind of where you want it to be. You're used to tracking your orders in Shop app. Now you're going to be able to handle that end-to-end return directly. Yeah. It's just, it's really nice.
Kurt:
Okay. And then the, the setup for that, it really, I'm doing it in my Shopify admin with my store locations.
Kenny:
Correct. Yeah.
Kurt:
Okay. Is this really, is setting this up like a series of checkboxes?
Kenny:
It seems like it's easy.
Kurt:
It's easy.
Kenny:
It's easy. There's actually a new kind of like sales in person setting on retail stores.
Kurt:
So.
Kenny:
Um, you might have a physical location that actually doesn't have, uh, you know, inventory. So as long as you have that salesperson, uh, discoverable hit surfaces.
Kurt:
Okay. And then, all right, if I don't have any physical location— I just want to clarify this— if I don't have a physical location, this may seem like it doesn't apply to you, but for sure we have seen people leverage POS, Shopify Retail POS, uh, for all kinds of pop-up and in-person events. You don't— you don't— my point is you don't have to sign a lease to take advantage of these features.
Kenny:
Yeah, I think we all probably think of POS as like, yeah, you have that, that beautiful storefront and that permanent setup, and like, that's just not the case. Like, people are selling on the go. We make that really convenient now. Um, so, you know, point of sale can happen anywhere.
Kurt:
We live in the same area, and I— I attend Wolf's Flea Market in Rosemont, and I am always delighted when someone— there's a few vendors, I pay them, they use Shopify POS in a flea market parking lot setting. Like, that is the versatility here.
Kenny:
I always—
Kurt:
that I always get a kick out of.
Kenny:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to go— to go from there to then, like, obviously the higher-end stores and places in your ass, like Old Orchard, and you see like the best brands in the world using POS. I know it's like those places are like Shopify Alley. It's how I think about them. It's like I can go store to store and I just see POS and all the places. So, um, yeah, yeah. I'm excited. Yeah.
Kurt:
I mean, uh, I'm in Westfield Old Orchard Mall in Skokie, Illinois. And if I were to go downstairs and walk around, I can pick out, oh geez, at least half a dozen stores that use Shopify Online and as many that use Shopify Point of Sale in their store. It's cool. It's a fun place to be. Um, okay. So we talked, we got posts and we've got this, this retail integration. And we have this, this smarter search, Agentic Search, where it really is a much more interactive, better experience. And it's personalized, it's tailored, and it sounds like largely automatic that these things are happening. So, okay, bigger picture, you've got these 3 features. What is, for you, what's the theme here?
Kenny:
Ultimately, like, we just want Shopify to be the best shopping destination in the world. That it's kind of that simple, and that kind of encapsulates the whole end-to-end experience of shopping is about discovery and finding great things and sometimes finding things when you don't have the words and creating even more and more personalized experience. I think that's becoming just a baseline expectation of commerce really as a buyer. And then all the way in towards those kind of a seamless, um, you know, remove friction things like, hey, let's make it easier to return And so to me, being the best shopping destination isn't just about discovery, or it isn't just about the order tracking and post-purchase experience. It's about being that one place that can kind of stitch together the whole commerce journey end to end and make something that's easy, delightful, frictionless as a buyer. And then, you know, as a brand, it helps, helps you as a merchant show up really, really well and just kind of build trust between, uh, you, you and the buyers who choose to buy from you.
Kurt:
I will— I think Shop is just— is such a great opportunity that is available to anyone that already has a presence on Shopify that it's worth investing in and playing with and reviewing and like taking it, taking advantage of these features and using Posts because it is a sales channel. And in most of the client retainer stores we work on, when they opt into it, it generates sales. You know, it is, it's there, it's real. There are people using it. Kenny, help me understand the opportunity here for folks.
Kenny:
Yeah, I mean, this is the thing. I think people don't understand how, uh, how kind of at scale the order tracking and post-purchase experience already is. I think on one of your previous, uh, episodes you were talking about the difficulty of, you know, organic search, the drop in organic search and discovery of brands, right? And this is a channel where your buyers are already interacting with your content for free in droves. And, you know, we, again, we have hundreds of millions of, of active Shop users, so they're already interacting with your brand and they want to continue discovery. Like, buyers want to continue shopping. They want to use this purchase to fuel the next one and find the next relevant product. So, I mean, that's, that's ultimately already happening. Like, that that interaction between buyers and brand. I think it's on brands to just kind of take advantage of that and say like, hey, how can I optimize my presence here? How can I connect with those customers? How can I use posts and put engaging content in front of them so they can ultimately discover more and more of my catalog?
Kurt:
And now I'm with you. Are the— when are these features available? When can I play with these?
Kenny:
So Shop Search is already live. With the Agentic features, you can see that on shop.app. You can see it on shop.app, which is our website. And the post features already got as well, along with the Instagram integration to auto post into shop.
Kurt:
Beautiful. Okay. Uh, of these features, we've got, you know, Agentic Search, posts, re— and this improved retail integration. All right. I, I, I think, you know, if you qualify for the, the improved retail integration stuff, you know. The in-store returns, et cetera. Agentic Search, it really sounds like that is something that I just get to take advantage of as a merchant without having to do anything special for it. You know, that is just the surface of Shop app, Shop doing the, the work for me. So posts, is that the big missed opportunity here? Like if I'm already creating this content, I should be syndicating it to Shop is what I'm hearing.
Kenny:
Yeah, I think that's especially, it's like a, you can configure it once, you can go into admin and 2 seconds connect to Instagram and it's going to auto-post from that point going forward. So it is really like that.
Kurt:
Automatic too.
Kenny:
It's automatic too. So like you can, because we know merchants are creating this content already, right? Like it's just a matter of like, do you really want to cross-post manually across all these different channels with their buyers? Probably not.
Kurt:
I don't, but I will if I have to.
Kenny:
Right. You will if you have to. But like, you know, why Voller? So, um, we're connected with Instagram. We're connected with other third-party video apps as well. So you can go configure those once and it will auto-syndicate into Shop. And there's legitimate, uh, like real uplift in impressions and discovery of your brand of Shop when you use these features. So I think that's about like, hey, go do a thing, call to action.
Kurt:
I like that. I like that a lot, man. I got already in my head, I'm like thinking about the clients. I want to be like, hey. You've got all this great content. Let's get this connected and it'll post. I'm making a mental inventory of like after this call who I have to go, go do this for. Yeah.
Kenny:
I mean, I think like, again, people really do underestimate how much engagement there is around order tracking between buyers and your brand. You know, every, every kind of order tracking experience, it's, it's not even just like one notification. It's like really a journey. And every time I open up the app around that journey, it's a new opportunity for that brand to kind of hook you to the next thing, to learn about your new products, to get closer to the why behind your brand, the story of your brand. So, um, you know, it's not just about that kind of utility of, yeah, where's my order? Where's my order? We really turn that kind of customer problem and ultimately merchant inbound, you know, inbound for merchants into a really positive experience.
Kurt:
It's been, it's been so fun. To watch this app grow and become what it is. As long as I have you here, I'm sure you talk to people, you know, using your features every day. What's the missed opportunity? What's the thing where you're like, man, I wish more people would do X?
Kenny:
I think especially coming out of this edition is go use posts. It's an amazing way to reach buyers who are already discovering your brand. Use it as an opportunity to tell the story of your products, tell the story of your brand. Why did you get started? Why did you make this product? Who's it for? What's it amazing at? And the beautiful thing is you can of course go in and kind of craft posts that are dedicated to Shop. You can also actually connect us to Instagram and you do that once and it will cross-post into Shop going forward. So all of your Reels and future posts will find the right customer inside of Shop, you know, in an app where they're actually intending to shop and discover content, right? So it's not pure kind of like entertainment. It's really users who are here to shop and using this content that you're already producing to, uh, you know, improve conversion and just improve their understanding of your products.
Kurt:
And there, that's a part I don't think we made clear enough. Intent. If I go into Instagram, I wanna see updates from, you know, my friends, from my family, from brands I like. I don't necessarily wanna be sold to. And it's, you know, inherently it is interruption marketing, classic interruption marketing. Versus when I go to a marketplace— Shop is a marketplace— I am much higher intent. You know, I'm not there to scroll, to do doomscrolling. I'm there because I'm interested in shopping. I'm raising my hand, say, hey, you know, and I've already got my payment method, etc. It makes it much easier, you know, to, to convert and sell to those customers, especially when you can engage in and make them feel something. And that's what the content And the posts do. Okay. Ooh, I'm sold. Oh, I wanna, I wanna see posts in action. I wanna play with it. I'm, I'm getting excited.
Kenny:
Open it up. It's already, this one's already live. You can check it out. Um, scroll through your feed on Shop and you'll start to see brands already, already taking advantage of it and seeing some really good results.
Kurt:
Will, and then to turn it on, I go in my Shopify admin. Where do I go?
Kenny:
So if you go to Shopify admin, um, check out the Shop Sales Channel. And there's a new tab within the Shop sales channel just called Posts, and you can go set everything up there.
Kurt:
I, uh, that's what I'm about to go do. As soon as we get off the call, I'm gonna go play with that. Man, Kenny Cohen, Shopify, thank you so much for sharing this with me.
Kenny:
Thanks for having us.
Kurt:
Hey, before you go, I was hoping you would check out our new app, PromoParty Pro. It is what I want to be the single best, easiest way to run a free gift with purchase promo on Shopify. We just put it live in the App Store. We've got less than 50 users. We want your feedback. So if you need to run a free gift with purchase promo in the near future, install it, try it. There's a live chat. I check that all the time. And so if you have any issues at all, you know, or any suggestions on how we can make it even easier to use, Let us know. We're happy to help. If you want to try it, search Promo Party in the App Store. Promo Party Pro is the app. Give it a shot. It's got a free trial. Thanks.