Shopify's ads, explained by the VP who runs them.
"We actually take the media risk when we buy off-app. And if we don't buy well, that's on us. That's not on the merchant."
Samir Pradhan ran ads at Pinterest and Google. Now he runs merchant marketing at Shopify, a company that says it is not an ads company. For the Fall '26 Edition, Shop Campaigns goes from two countries to 35, and Campaign Autopilot is out of early access and live for every merchant.
Kurt asks the questions a merchant would: what counts as a sale, where the ads show up, whether you should pay to win back a past customer, and how much rope to give an AI media buyer. Plus what Autopilot means for brands that already have an agency, why Samir thinks email is underused, and where Shopify takes marketing automation next.
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What you'll learn:
Guest: Samir Pradhan, VP Product, Merchant Marketing, Shopify.
Shopify Fall '26 Edition: https://www.shopify.com/editions/fall2026
Campaign Autopilot: https://www.shopify.com/campaign-autopilot
Shop Campaigns: https://www.shopify.com/shop-campaigns
Samir Pradhan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samir-pradhan-71978120
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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 • 00:00.000
This episode is brought to you in part by Swym. Here's the thing about wish list apps. Most of them just sit there. A customer saves a product, and then nothing happens. Swym 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 card abandonment, wish list data is permission-based. These are people raising their hands saying, hey, I want this, just not right now. Swym's been around for over a decade. It powers 45,000 stores and installs in about five minutes. You could try it for free today at getswym.com slash Kurt. That's G-E-T-S-W-Y-M dot com slash Kurt. Okay, but severe you run ads for Shopify the tough high is not an ads company as far as I know
Samir • 01:16.786
Yeah, I mean, you know, I think Shopify looks at ads very differently than most companies that build ad-related products. The key part of it is to kind of be very, very merchant-centric. A lot of merchants, when you talk to them, you listen to what they're saying, all kind of say the same thing, which is... want to grow growth is our biggest challenge and our answer to that is well how can we help you start selling in more places and so when we think about ads we think about helping the merchant be in control it might be a new merchant that has never tried ads before and helping them get started in the easiest way possible with as little risk as possible And so you're right, we're not an ads company, but we think ads is a great way for our merchants to start selling, finding new customers, re-engaging existing customers, and the products we build kind of have that merchant centricity so that they can start selling that.
Kurt • 02:21.556
I love it. That's what we're going to talk about today on
Samir • 02:23.206
Yeah.
Kurt • 02:23.656
the unofficial Shopify podcast. We are joined by Samir Pradhan, VP of Product, Merchant Marketing at Shopify. This guy's got experience with it. You ran ads at Pinterest, Google and YouTube, right?
Samir • 02:35.906
Yes. Yeah.
Kurt • 02:36.856
Yeah, I mean, it's a great experience here. And welcome back. We last talked, I believe last April about campaign Autopilot. And at that time, it was in limited availability. Today, it's... say it's general availability but we'll get into that and man like that i'm excited about because but I think as far as deep into AI as I am, I need you to convince me to trust the robot on this one. But we'll get there. So,
Samir • 03:03.258
Absolutely.
Kurt • 03:03.558
okay.
Samir • 03:03.658
We'll talk about all the ways you can trust the robot.
Kurt • 03:06.858
We'll get there. Severe. So, all right, Shopify editions, fall 2026 just dropped. Within it, what are you in charge of? What are you responsible for and proud of?
Samir • 03:18.836
I'm proud of all of it. I think if you look at the sum total of all what the companies worked on in service of merchants, it's frankly just incredible. And our theme this year is, you know, exponential. It just represents the idea that, you know, when you start adding in all the features and the layers to go from your store to how you grow it, how you optimize, etc. That value compounds and really can help a merchant take off. Within that, what I oversee is the marketing section. And that's, you know, that's from a merchant's perspective. So how do how does a merchant use marketing to start growing their customer base? They're going from having no customers to a set of customers that buy the first time from a set of customers that buy once to buying again. and there's a bunch of different you know things that we launched from like making that easier to do allowing merchants to do it in more places understanding the impact of their marketing very excited to talk about it with you today you know
Kurt • 04:23.572
So we've got, all right, of things in Editions, shop
Samir • 04:27.072
Right.
Kurt • 04:27.572
campaign, Shop Campaigns now available globally.
Samir • 04:31.622
Yes.
Kurt • 04:32.722
Previously, where was this? Was this North America only, U.S. only?
Samir • 04:36.122
U.S. Canada. Yeah.
Kurt • 04:37.222
Okay. And now. Who's got it?
Samir • 04:40.962
Well, now it's in 35 countries. It's basically anywhere where shop pay is. So, you know, we went from U.S. and Canada. We got Australia. We've got a large part of EU, you know, Italy, France, UK, etc. Gibraltar is one of the countries that we now support. So it's a lot of countries. And, you know, we see merchants, of course. you know, selling more through Shop Campaigns and advertising in their home markets, but also, of course, merchants sell internationally. And so we've opened up access to that buyer network, you know, in all these markets as well.
Kurt • 05:16.688
So if I'm in the US and I sell internationally,
Samir • 05:18.688
Yeah,
Kurt • 05:18.788
can I advertise in those countries?
Samir • 05:20.738
yeah, you
Kurt • 05:21.738
And then if I'm in Gibraltar, I could run these campaigns as well.
Samir • 05:25.888
do it.
Kurt • 05:26.836
Perfect. Okay, so we've got our availability is expanded all around.
Samir • 05:30.636
Right.
Kurt • 05:30.986
Walk me through, I want to walk through Shop Campaigns again because it works differently.
Samir • 05:35.036
Yes.
Kurt • 05:35.286
When we talk about digital advertising, typically we're referring to PPC, pay per click,
Samir • 05:40.386
Right.
Kurt • 05:40.436
but this is PPS, it's pay per sale,
Samir • 05:42.736
Yeah.
Kurt • 05:42.936
which I think could be tough for people to wrap their head around because they're not used to it.
Samir • 05:47.188
someone recently asked me like how do you how do you convince someone to run Shop Campaigns and I told them I was joking with them I said it's kind of the easiest sell there is um because it's so merchant centric if you think about it you know new merchants but also merchants that are scaling I think all of us have you know if you've ever advertised you have this thing in the back of your mind I'm spending money how do I know I'm going to get a good return I think there's that old adage like you know 50% of my marketing money is wasted I just don't know which 50% I don't know if you've heard that before it's always stuck with me you know it's about the if you knew what worked you could spend better well I think we approach that from the perspective of merchant that isn't an expert and doesn't have to be And we kind of say like, look, on other platforms, kind of just the ads industry is going to grow up saying you can buy impressions, you can buy clicks, you can optimize towards sale. We take it one step further and we say you only pay when there's a sale. And that, I think, kind of makes Shop Campaigns the easiest way to get started and also one of the most risk-free ways to do advertising. um and so merchants really really love that order
Kurt • 07:02.772
All right, when we say pay per sale, what counts as a sale? Like order confirmed?
Samir • 07:06.872
confirmed yeah and this is like you know you use shopify you see an order there's attribution to that order this isn't about you know claiming attribution through a variety of different touch points this is like of a sale here it is and you know i think that gives that gives a lot of trust to merchants that When they pay, they know that there's an outcome associated. That builds a lot of trust that gets people started.
Kurt • 07:36.596
And then my Shop Campaign, what are my placements here? Is this just solely inside shop app?
Samir • 07:40.996
Well, you know, we, when a merchant advertises, ads are part of the shop app. So we provide access to buyers that use shop to discover new brands and, you know, transact in shop and all the wonderful brands on Shopify, they use Shopify, they are, you know, on shop. And... you know buyers get access to those brands discover those brands and the thing that we think that makes Shop Campaigns unique is that there's often a buyer incentive you'll get a deal or you'll get something that kind of motivates you to try and buy a brand out so those placements on shop are actually quite a fan favorite from a buyer perspective
Kurt • 08:24.564
Give me an example because I know like I'll log into shop and I'll be like, oh you've got shop cash go man now We gotta spend this
Samir • 08:31.014
What a good problem to have to spend shop cash. I think I think you know one example would be if someone said look I'm willing to spend $40 to get a new customer sale a new customer sale and by the way on Shop Campaigns you can kind of say I only want to spend $20 to get re-engagement from customer that might have bought for me before but for a new customer here's what I want to spend. um we helped you say well part of that is you know making sure that offer um it gets in front of the right buyers and part of that is also making sure that those buyers get an incentive to buy so they might see you know if you buy you know x dollars worth you'll get y dollars off and i think that really helps drive buyers to discover Try and take action on brands they may not have seen before, products they may have not bought before, and we facilitate that in a very natural way that's part of the experience in shop. Um,
Kurt • 09:24.394
yeah it's a natural way it just when you say it out loud i'm like all right that sounds a little funny but yeah try it it does feel natural even like i'm i have seen the Shop Campaign you know on the back office side and opening the app and then getting the shop cash i'm still i'm still gonna go for it right it's effective
Samir • 09:43.344
yeah, um, but you mentioned, you know, where the placements are. And one of the things we do, you know, for a lot of folks, Shop Campaigns is the first way they get started with advertising and we help, you know, we help bring access to. And we help, you know, we help bring access to buyers that we find on Google, on Meta, on other platforms, even ChatGPT actually, bring them back to shop and, you know, help grow that buyer base, customer base for those merchants. And what's interesting, you know, this goes back to our merchant aligned point of view, because we're doing this in a way where the merchant only pays when there's a sale, we actually take the media risk when we buy off app. And if we don't buy well. that's that's on us that's not on the merchant right but if we buy well it's such a great experience where that that you know that that merchant would have gotten a sale from a buyer they've never seen before from a channel they don't have a campaign dedicated and that is something that we've gotten a lot better as we've been you know doing advertising in the past year buying and finding buyers bringing them to shop getting them exposure merchants and driving those sales right
Kurt • 11:00.518
So I could do this one campaign, one Shop Campaign, it'll appear in shop, which like that shop is great. It functions like a marketplace. You know, if I am using the app fundamentally, you know, even just opening an app called shop, I am primed for shopping. I'm browsing in the very minimum. And but then in addition to that okay we need advent inventory there's only so many people in one app but there are more people elsewhere on the internet so we can also show these same offers this is all through one campaign in meta chat gpt pinterest cool it's like it just seems good when you hear it explained and then i can set like what's my minimum to do this for budget
Samir • 11:44.260
And I think, you know, the health talk is pretty helpful for folks to get started, but it's pretty low minimum. I can get back to you in the details, but like you could just start with a daily budget and what you're willing to spend for customer acquisition. And actually, you know, speaking of minimums, we had the reason I have to look up the answer, by the way, is because we recently reduced a lot of the minimums on the product to make merchant eligibility way easier, you know, so more merchants can get started. So it actually is supposed to be the easy way to get started and the minimums are not supposed to get in the way of that.
Kurt • 12:22.390
Okay.
Samir • 12:22.740
I don't think I've ever, you know, been asked what's the minimum, because I think it's pretty flexible, actually. Yeah.
Kurt • 12:28.388
all right uh i will check the health docs we'll
Samir • 12:31.538
Yeah, well I'll
Kurt • 12:32.238
see so
Samir • 12:32.388
make sure you get to yeah.
Kurt • 12:33.688
yeah i've been looking at the no there's not a fixed minimum budget for Shop Campaigns in the health doc anyway
Samir • 12:40.338
Yeah, yeah
Kurt • 12:41.238
so there you go uh but and then daily budget is required so i just that's what i have to set it's just decide this is my daily budget And it's for me description, it sounds like it. I'm going to do a lot better. I'm going to have a better time. This is true of all online advertising. If I know my unit economics.
Samir • 12:59.900
This is it. You know, and I think that you set a budget and you set your, you know, like you said, it's not pay-per-click. It's more like. you know cost customer acquisition right so what's your what's your what's your CAC um you know customer acquisition cost you put it in there and you can differentiate it across new customers and customers who bought before because I think a lot of folks you know rightfully a lot of merchants say hey look Do I really need to pay for someone that has bought for me before? That's a very natural question, natural feeling. Why am I paying for someone? But I think, you know, first of all, if that were true, you know, retargeting campaigns would never be a thing. And of course, retargeting campaigns across the industry are a thing.
Kurt • 13:47.652
Um, you know, quite effective and
Samir • 13:49.652
quite effective and
Kurt • 13:50.552
standard.
Samir • 13:50.802
standard but i think there's another part of this here which is even for large and well-known household a sale isn't guaranteed the next time right you kind of have to earn it uh part of that especially for smaller newer brands is saying i know someone bought it for me before i bought something for me before i know they loved it but How in their heads am I, how well positioned am I, how deep in their hearts am I that the next time they need something, they're going to think of me and me only.
Kurt • 14:22.960
How are you going to stay top of mind?
Samir • 14:24.510
You know, as they have to drive sales on a transactional basis, they also have to account for the fact that they might be a smaller brand, they might be a newer brand, they might be in a competitive space. So being able to engage. existing folks that are bought from you and get them to buy again i mean that i think is is really the core of marketing you want to go from you know zero purchase to one from one to n grow your basket size do it in better and better economics i think we can help with that we've kind of made that super easy with with chocolate
Kurt • 14:55.236
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Samir • 15:48.942
Yeah,
Kurt • 15:49.142
new okay
Samir • 15:49.442
you can yeah,
Kurt • 15:49.942
i think that's helpful and
Samir • 15:51.892
right
Kurt • 15:52.492
then the other one is i can automate some of this right campaign Autopilot
Samir • 15:59.972
Hmm.
Kurt • 16:00.822
Well,
Samir • 16:00.872
Wow.
Kurt • 16:01.322
marketing automation I love automation
Samir • 16:02.872
Yeah.
Kurt • 16:03.172
I love and
Samir • 16:03.972
Right.
Kurt • 16:04.422
you know since September I've gone to I have committed to the robots I said you know what let's experiment let's go how far can we take this and now I try to do everything end-to-end agentic if I can so the idea of well my media buyer is also an AI why not that's what campaign Autopilot That's the promise of campaign Autopilot. It's
Samir • 16:25.004
Yeah.
Kurt • 16:25.304
in general availability now. Everybody's got this, right? Okay. So what do we, when we last talked, it was June it went, it was limited availability.
Samir • 16:35.554
Right.
Kurt • 16:36.304
Since then, what's changed?
Samir • 16:38.654
Well, we're in GA, so we have, you know, much, much broader availability. You know, we look at this as a way to make. marketing enabled by AI available right into Shopify admin and kind of delivering this promise that we want Shopify to be the best place for you to start and run your business. We also want it to be an incredible place to help you grow your business. And I think, you know, what that means for a lot of folks is start selling in more places. And the one way that we are starting with that is with that. There's obviously a lot to do when it comes to marketing that goes beyond that. And we'll talk about some of the ways that we're starting to help there. But if you think about, you know, all the ways that we can help grow someone. ads comes to the top to help them start selling and we wanted to make that really easy in the product right built into Shopify so as an example you know you come in and you say I'm going to start advertising well you talk about trust the robots you know we obviously have we obviously if we take trust our merchants trust really seriously really seriously And the way we translate that into the product is that even as you get to automation, you're in control. As a merchant, you specify the goals, but also the guardrails, and you kind of, as the product delivers for you, you have an opportunity as a merchant to give it more permission. But if you don't want to, you can still approve all the changes yourself. You know, that's something that, you know, each merchant is on a journey of figuring out what they want control on and a product is built that way. Just to contrast it with Shopify campaigns for a second. You know, Shop Campaigns want it to be, you know, not only the easiest, but also a lowest risk way to get started in advertising. And I talk about how we take the media risk when we go buy, you know, off-site with Autopilot. This really allows merchants to kind of go beyond, we consider a risk-free boundary and kind of say like, look, I'm willing to invest my business entrepreneurship in general is inherently about growing beyond a risk-free boundary. So how do I do that? But even as that becomes something they want to do. We think Autopilot is probably the best place for them to do that. And the reason is because you can specify your goal, because you need controlled guardrails. Guardrails like, where do I want to show up? You know, which channels am I okay with versus not? What costs and targets am I open with, you know, or good with or not? And for any pool of money that I give, dedicate to advertising. You know, I want to know that I'm not just spending it across all these channels, but I'm doing it in a way that is very calculative about where results are coming from, what channels are working for me, and then I double down with what's working. So this kind of goes back to the, you know, 50% of my money in marketing, I can't account for it, it's wasted, I just don't know which 50%. We try to chip away that problem by saying, well, we actually can do attribution across multiple channels, and we can help you. double down where it's working um and that would help you get better results than you would if you were to do it yourself you could it'll be a lot faster if you do it yourself and we stay very calculative about how we we do this performance optimization for mergers yeah
Kurt • 20:20.700
So within it, quickly, what are the channels that Campaign Autopilot can run for me?
Samir • 20:26.500
so so today we um we're on meta uh we're on shop we're you know Microsoft um and with the additions now like Snap um and X is coming soon um and so you know we're we're constantly growing the the pool of channels that you can connect to um and then you know getting better and better at making sure that those channels are all you know all give these merchants a strong start so for example Even if I decide I'm going down the path of setting up, you know, a campaign on Snap or campaign on Meta, I would really need to know what I'm doing in terms of what campaign, what daily budget, what cost. They both have different attribution systems. How do I really reconcile it? Where am I putting my money? So we kind of. You don't require to be an expert in any given channel and even if you are an expert in one channel chances you're not an expert in all channel and so we really can take that cross-media view and make it easy for me
Kurt • 21:31.572
And going back, you talked about, hey, people choose their comfort level of trust with this app, with this sales channel. And in campaign Autopilot, like any relationship with a person or an agent, you start at low trust. And then so we've got like max guardrails. And then as we develop trust and we go, hey, first outing, you didn't mess it up. Good. give it a little we we loosen the uh the guardrails a little more we take some we give it more permission to manage more on its own or perhaps more budget or additional channel whatever we're comfortable with and then you know wherever it lands is what it is per store per person what they feel works for them i like this approach and i think like that this approach is how most people should approach any new ai product right it's just like all right start start slow get comfortable with it you're not going to jump in all the way way at once and yeah that's the approach i've taken and often very quick like it does not take long before i'm like all right just go yolo mode let's
Samir • 22:32.048
Right.
Kurt • 22:32.548
see what we got here uh but walk me through it walk me through a That process or like what what those guardrails what that that trust building exercise with
Samir • 22:42.100
Yeah.
Kurt • 22:42.550
the robot looks like
Samir • 22:43.950
Right. I mean, look, I think the guardrails come in a few different forms. The guardrails are on which channels you're part of. The guardrails come on how much budget you're putting there and the costs that you have for that budget. If we want to shift things around between one platform or another. if you really want to prove that change and as you start to see results and we start to drive them you can kind of say kind of like always allow you know it's like how the way you interact with AI just says allow you know allow for this channel always allow so we kind of build this progressive permissioning into the product one of the things that the team is really they can seriously try to do this and it's it's really interesting because you know a lot of a lot of permissions are often like a one-and-done dialogue box or tick box or a setting somewhere but I you know we're approaching this in a way where You can actually specify more than we support today as your guardrail. And we'll try to tell you which
Kurt • 23:51.984
How's
Samir • 23:52.284
ones
Kurt • 23:52.384
that?
Samir • 23:52.484
we can fulfill, right? Because underlying Autopilot is, you know, the engine is kind of driven off this domain-specific language that... You know, if someone really wanted to go and nerd out on marketing automation, they can start using, you know, the level of a domain-specific language one level lower. And obviously you can code a lot more things than you can do through the UI, and you might ask for things that we don't yet support. And so what we want to do is, you know, I'm just giving you a little bit of preview into our product development kind of conversations, how we think about it. What we should do is kind of say, here's what we support. Here's what's not support. So we're being transparent. And we also can kind of get a sense of like, what are the controls that merchants want that we don't yet have? By the way, when we light those up, we should make sure we tell them. So sometimes like, look. I want this additional guardrail. It's not available. I'm still okay. It's not a showstopper, but I want that. And when it comes to life for me implemented, I'll tell you. So I think that's just a little bit more into how seriously we take maintaining building trust.
Kurt • 25:07.886
I agree with the approach. I think it's absolutely perfect, at least, you know, from my experience, this is. I think the right way to approach it. What does Campaign Autopilot use for creative?
Samir • 25:19.714
So right now we use the catalog that merchants have. But I think that, you know, looking ahead, I think you're kind of touching on something that's really important in general with ads and with marketing, which is creative quality. I think that there's a lot that we can do. um to help with better creative through campaign Autopilot um we haven't done yet we're still early days with this whole you know product initiative it's it's it's one that we're heavily invested and very committed to um but you're right creative is a big area of opportunity that i think can unlock a lot more performance for margin and you know with campaign Autopilot
Kurt • 26:00.244
Where does this fit into a brand that may already have an agency running ads for them?
Samir • 26:07.594
Yeah. I think it allows them to dip their toes and try what, you know, automated marketing via Shopify can do. I think it, you know, also allows them to try channels that they might not have with their agency. And, you know, I think we see brands on a spectrum of, you know, for a lot of folks. they might want to work with an agency it's just not something that they can realistically the path they can go down and so we're we're making this accessible to them imagine you had someone on your team sitting beside you that was dedicated to your growth well now you can't right so that's that's you know what it is for a lot of merchants for merchants that have an agency there's a lot that agencies do that are super valuable beyond the type of ads that we currently support on campaign Autopilot so that's going to continue to be an important relationship for them to grow and at the same time they can try the kind of benefit of having this always on you know performance tuned campaign that really goes in you know cross media and interest by cross media and one of the things that you know we we have with campaign Autopilot is these accounts these ad accounts are really the merchant's account so you know when you buy on meta when you buy on Microsoft that's the merchant's ad account they own that account they can go look at it um we don't think they would need to but they can i think what that really speaks to is this idea of portability it's it's really their asset um and you know it's an easy way to try something of you know um by setting another account or using it to try a new campaign um i think that a lot of merchants will are probably in the in the basket of i can't really work with the agency and for them this is probably the strongest growth partner they're just sitting with them
Kurt • 28:09.844
No, absolutely.
Samir • 28:10.644
Yeah.
Kurt • 28:10.794
The other thing I've noticed, at least with our retainer clients, where like all of them have an agency for meta,
Samir • 28:16.244
Yep.
Kurt • 28:16.344
you know, at the minimum,
Samir • 28:17.444
Right.
Kurt • 28:17.494
but then they'll have channels they have not explored yet. Well, you know, if I want to explore them and see if like these are worthwhile to
Samir • 28:25.144
Yes.
Kurt • 28:25.294
end off to an agency, let's figure it out ourselves first. And that's where I think campaign Autopilot can really excel. Like, all right, these are, I'm, you know, I'm probably on meta already.
Samir • 28:35.394
Right.
Kurt • 28:36.244
yeah I've been at this for
Samir • 28:37.144
Yes.
Kurt • 28:37.244
a while but maybe I'm not on Snap and
Samir • 28:38.744
Yeah.
Kurt • 28:38.944
I'm probably not on x right like okay let's play with those with campaign Autopilot and then of course you know having it manage shop seems like a natural fit one would think
Samir • 28:48.144
Yeah. And you know, like agency or not, because I think that's kind of an orthogonal dimension. I think agency or not, you're right. A lot of merchants are probably on meta or have tried meta or are actively doing their. their campaign management or meta i think this is a responsibility we have to make the product good enough where you should say okay you do it right like i think that's something that we have to earn our way for someone who has a different and i think for us going back to a shopify to me you use ads in shopify but shopify is not an ads company well this is part of it which is Our entire goal here is to drive merchant growth. That is the prime directive of this whole thing. And so we're going to continue to tune Campaign Autopilot so that it does growth more and more optimally. Scales budget.
Kurt • 29:51.428
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Samir • 30:52.548
Great. We'll see, you know, getting anyone to let me do that is a little different. But man, it seems like an exciting product and the premise, like I have enough experience here that this is all entirely plausible, right? I wish I had been able to see it for myself and it is no fault of anyone's. It will happen, right? It just has not happened yet. Yeah, I think we should make it happen, Kurt. I think, you know, when we get the, I'll find a way for us to make sure you see the product because I'd love to get your hands on it.
Kurt • 31:24.580
Yes.
Samir • 31:24.980
Yeah,
Kurt • 31:25.480
No,
Samir • 31:25.580
yeah,
Kurt • 31:25.980
that'd be great. I got one person who's like this close is like, all right, we're going to let it run shop. Like these are,
Samir • 31:30.730
absolutely.
Kurt • 31:30.780
they've, you know, they've had a great experience with shop. And it's a large part of why I've become an advocate for Shop Campaigns and shop cash just because I've seen the success and now I'm like, man, I want that experience for campaign Autopilot and it just, it'll happen. You know, the thing, it's just, it's a new feature simply is the sole reason. Cool. You know, I found a quote from you in Adweek, and you said email is underused. Tell me, tell me why.
Samir • 32:02.358
You know, I think that actually it depends. A lot of people have a lot of preconceived notions about email and that's spammy and it's I get so much stuff I don't even look at my email on a personal basis. I have a large unread email count myself. So, you know, in some cases, people get a lot of email. But I think that what folks often miss is that it is still such an important channel for folks who do it right, for merchants who do it right. And, you know, we look at when we look at Shopify messaging. in messages it allows you to do you know not only not only email but also sms and whatsapp by the way non-us but whatsapp um look at this and say if you have a relationship with a customer well one way of doing this quote-unquote wrong not really wrong but suboptimally it's kind of just spray and pray but imagine you could make those messages personalized right because you know what that buyer wants because you know the type of products that will appeal to them because you can synchronize it with you know the most opportune time to send it um we think when that happens email is actually quite effective and not a lot of people are using email that way that's kind of what i mean we also recently had a bunch of launches where our you know our ml model said pull this message back for this user because they're likely to unsubscribe so we're taking the other side of that too and saying how could we smarter about not sending email when it's unlikely to work and then when we do send it having more personalized i think there's a lot of upside a lot of opportunity a lot of sales driven through email
Kurt • 33:48.772
Could, in the future, could Campaign Autopilot help run my email campaigns?
Samir • 33:52.872
Well, technically it does.
Kurt • 33:54.222
Oh, really?
Samir • 33:54.722
We do. Yeah, I didn't mention it, but it does. We have an integration with Messenger. It's a basic integration right now. um but we but it's there for a reason we're going to build on it to see you know how do you um how do you draft the right content by the way you can already use psychic for a lot of this stuff you can use psychic to draft an email change images generate all this stuff and
Kurt • 34:15.176
well and that's kind of why i ask because i'm like i know just from experience i know all the pieces are there it's simply a question of whether or not they've been you know told to talk to each other
Samir • 34:23.076
right and the connection has been established and there's basic functionality but you're right there's a lot more we can do to kind of say you say go drive on you know automate engagements for me and we need to be very careful as we do that with email obviously because you know you want to make sure that your brands represent and that's that's what we're working on um but we can do with Autopilot and there's a lot more yeah
Kurt • 34:44.396
yeah a lot of it is i'd imagine a lot of features at this point are like absolutely we could just do that and roll that out today but if we want to do it right it's going to be longer
Samir • 34:54.692
Yeah. And, you know, I think like this goes back to trust, guardrails and performance. And we think that we push the boundary forward on all those dimensions.
Kurt • 35:04.542
You know, and I appreciate that because a lot of anything goes wrong at all in any piece of software and people are like, oh, it's five coded. Okay, well, guess what? That's how software is written now. That's just the reality of it. And we had bugs before vibe coding. Yeah. And at that time, we weren't like, oh, AI wrote it.
Samir • 35:21.830
Right. Right.
Kurt • 35:22.680
That's silly. But yeah, no, I think, yeah, slow and slow and careful, slow and steady, you know, make sure it works is the right approach
Samir • 35:29.880
And,
Kurt • 35:29.930
here.
Samir • 35:30.080
you know, I think one of the things is we've laid a foundation that's quite strong now and we can start adding a lot more functionality on top of that. And, you know, we understand, you know, hey, we need to work on reducing the friction so a merchant can get onboarded onto a platform much more seamlessly. We understand, you know, how do you give better bid and budget guidance? We understand that, you know, each channel is going to have more and more sophisticated kind of campaign execution plans that we can run. We understand that creative is another dimension that we're going to have to go and think about. all those benefits just accruing to you automatically as we launch them because you're using the product and so we just think about this like rolling thunder of things we can do to make things you know better for our
Kurt • 36:17.892
everything you've built is cool but the potential of you know all the other stuff you could do and that's how my mind operates when i'm thinking about marketing automation it's like well if it could do this here's the 10 other things
Samir • 36:28.342
What
Kurt • 36:28.392
that could probably
Samir • 36:28.692
else can it
Kurt • 36:28.992
work
Samir • 36:29.092
do?
Kurt • 36:29.242
too
Samir • 36:29.342
What else can it do? Yeah, exactly.
Kurt • 36:30.642
yeah it's like just a tremendous amount of potential here and so i think it might be worthwhile to explore these products now you know even if you're like all right i just tried it you know i did a trial with it and then we're going to revisit it later knowing that knowing that these things are going to evolve where do you think it you know given that you know where do you think it goes from here
Samir • 36:50.618
Well, I think there's two dimensions, and I kind of mentioned one of them here, which is getting better at the craft, the art and science of running great campaigns. So, you know, we do more channels and we do more sophisticated campaign strategy and we be more, you know, laser guided on where performance is working, double down on budgets there. So that's one bucket, which is performance. another bucket is you know oh sorry there's one bucket's performance another one is channels like can we get more channels so that this becomes more and more of a cross-media solution and then another one that we I'm really excited about is how do we interact with the merchant as we learn discover and do more for that i'll give you some practical examples all kind of like unsolved problems in the sense that we we can really solve this in the ways that most folks are you know would probably do today which is a wizard or a dial-up box or really kind of take this to the next level and say how would we do this in a real consultative communicative way with the merchant um and then do what we can for them when they give us permission and i'll give you a couple scenarios for example imagine we know that merchants spend more during the holidays because they want to drive more sales really important And they also are willing to spend more per sale during holiday, right? Because costs are higher. Turns out inflation is also true in the ads, you know, impression market. So how do we how do we make merchants aware of that so that we can tune their campaign, set them up for success? How do we tell them that a collection they have? There's a lot of inventory behind it, and it'd be good to go and set up a campaign that, you know, brings more exposure to that. So we can kind of really understand the dynamics of their business, their store, to help them think about how marketing can be specific goals to help drive specific outcomes for their business. How do we communicate that with a merchant? Where is the most natural place for that to happen? So working on stuff like that. One of the things that we are announcing today is Sidekick has a new superpower where it can, I always think about these days, here's a new superpower of being able to do SEO optimization. It's on this journey of figuring out how to do SEO.
Kurt • 39:17.540
Yeah,
Samir • 39:17.540
um well
Kurt • 39:18.240
yeah, I saw Autopilot SEO get mentioned
Samir • 39:20.340
and Autopilot basically says hey psychic like let's do this um and sets it up so that you know psychic goes and values all the seo opportunities of course the merchants Of course, the merchant's in control and those changes are made in admin. So it's right there. But that is the beginning of this journey where we can be very thoughtful and say, let's help the merchant look at the business. In fact, let's look it for them and let's come up with a set of recommendations. that go beyond quote-unquote advertising really span more of the marketing tasks that a merchant may want to do let's be helpful let's be specific let's be goal-oriented and also make sure that they're in control have guardrails I think this framework in general can allow a lot for merchants to do to grow their business I think that is the core of what we want to build on Shopify it kind of speaks to the theme of this edition which is exponential You know, you unlock all this, the power of these features help really emergence grow exponentially.
Kurt • 40:18.726
samir man i'm excited for what you've built you know you and the team um and yeah yes let's credit where credit is due um but i'm i'm excited for where this goes you know almost almost as much right just things are changing so quickly and i'm having fun so i'm like man you know what else could you build here Where do I go to learn more if I want to play with this right now in my store? Where do I go?
Samir • 40:43.332
You can find, you know, campaign Autopilot right in your left nav. You go to growth tab and there it is built right in.
Kurt • 40:54.282
Definitely going to play with it today.
Samir • 40:55.632
And for shop and for Shop Campaigns, by the way, you know, it's in the shop app.
Kurt • 41:00.282
I'm trying campaign growth campaigns. There it is. You're right. Cool. And your ears perk up for feedback around auditions.
Samir • 41:10.402
Yes.
Kurt • 41:10.652
Are we can we tweet at you where if someone wants to ping ping you with a suggestion, what do they do? Are you up for it? It's up to you.
Samir • 41:19.552
I am up for it, of course. You know, my dad always told me feedback was the breakfast of champions. That's because he had a lot of feedback for me, by the way. Um, but yes, you can tweet at me, um, at Samir P on X. I will start looking because it's not a thing I, I do a lot of myself, but I will start looking.
Kurt • 41:41.308
All right. I hope you get some good feedback. Samir Pradhan, Shopify. Thank you so much.
Samir • 41:47.208
Thank you, Kurt. It's a lot of fun.