Shopify Collabs

Providing a very easy platform by which to provide products and/or discounts to people with special codes that can tie back to sales is an A+ 5 star experience. A couple of clicks and all automated payment is all you can ask for.

However, there is no visibility into post gifting even though you have all their info. There's no analytics. There's no backend. There's no feedback.

I should be able to click on their profile and see if they've posted anything related to my product.
I should be able to message people or even send email campaigns and promotions to all my ambassadors or subsets of them.
I should be able to rate people so that other brands can see who follows through and who drives sales.

I would be surprised if even 10% of the people actually post content. It also does not drive sales. I may get 1 sale for every 3 gifts. It is absolutely of no direct value economically.

But I do get some good content from here, and it's much easier than having to deal with endless instagram requests for products. But Shopify could make this infinitely more value almost immediately with very little effort.

The app is a good way to get started with affiliate campaigns but I can't figure out a way to pause applicants. We have enough collaborators for now but they keep applying. If we remove our brand from the collabs network, the app tells us that existing affiliate links will be broken.

Improvements I would like to see is better search/filtering capabilities of the affiliates listed in the recruiting section of the app. Also, once an affiliate has joined the program, I wish it was easier for the affiliates to set up their automatic payments. Currently, it looks like the affiliates have to create a separate Hyperwallet account to get paid automatic commissions. I was hoping the affiliates could just enter their PayPal email address.

We've been skeptical of this application for a while due to the number of negative reviews. We have only been testing it for less than a day and can already see a lot of potential in this. It is well developed and has plenty of nice features. The great thing is - there's no monthly fee.

The only downside I can see is with the affiliates / influencers having to sign up through Shopify's own website rather than our own. It was incredibly easy to set up and wasn't complicated at all.

With regards to the issues some others have mentioned; such as influencers claiming a 'free gift' then not participating in the promotion of the brand or product, well all I can say is; it's not Shopify's fault. Every business should use caution and have the influencer to start promoting your brand for a few weeks before sending them a gift.

As for the person complaining about discount codes being misused. A misuse of a discount code may seem an issue for some, but I see it as a sale; regardless of whoever has used it when signing up. If they never found it, that sale could well have been lost.

I look forward to seeing new updates to this application. It looks promising.

It's important to understand what this app is and what is isn't. It is a simple way to find and invite influencers to work with your business, or for them to apply to you. Being native to Shopify the creation and allocation of discount codes and commission deals is easy, as is the payment of commission to influencers. You can create bespoke products offers or gifts for each partner.

However, the job of vetting who you work with and what you give them is down to you, as are the terms and conditions you set for your individual agreement with each partner. Have a think about this first and agree it with anyone you work with and you'll save yourself a world of trouble later down the line.

Overall, we like the app, it's easy to use, and largely automates the management of influencers. We'll probably move from our existing Affiliate platform at some point, but would like a few more features first, most obviously, the ability to change the email template that goes out to applicants. We have to re-write it every time, and it 'feels' like there's an option somewhere to change the template, but we've not been able to find it.

I'll give Dovetale four stars because it is now included with our Shopify subscription. We have abandoned our other provider and are fully operating on Dovetale now. However, we are feeling a lack of features and some of our affiliates have problems connecting their social accounts. Here are our suggestions, Dovetale:
-We need to be able to message influencers from the app
-Not all influencers are social media influencers. We would like the ability for people to sign up with an email address instead of a social account
-We need to pay commissions 'fixed amount per product' and that option is not available

Four stars, because in theory, this is a great app. But there is some important functionality/information that is just not clear - happy to update rating if Shopify can help with deeper understanding.

- can you outreach a creator directly from within the recruit tab? We can locate the creators we want to work with, add them to favorites, but there's no way to outreach them other then via an email list upload?? Something is missing.
- what are the sharing requirements for creators - for example, do they just get a link that can be shared in link.bio, or are there other ways that they can share their link? Need more clarification on this.
- What is the difference between members and affiliates?

Very hopeful for this app!

Great, easy installation app but room for improvement.

Really great way to get afiliates working, could use a few Quality-of-life improvements however.

First on the free products gifts, it would be great to be able to specify a collection rather than just specific products, the ability to choose how many of those are free is great but it would help if you could also choose a whole collection.

A resources page for collaborators.
a simple space for collaborators to download simple images to place on their store, logos, and the like, bonus points if you can create an image generator with the collaborator's code / link.

Edit: I would also love an automated gift system. I.e. is a collaborator makes x number of sales or y amount of sales value, they could either get a free gift or an upgrade in their status. Having this clearly shown on the page will really incentivize collaborators to do so.

I only wish you could directly reach out to affiliates via collabs through the discover feature. It would be great if there was a way to email or msg them.