Ainfluencer for Shopify Sellers

Three ways creators can work for your store

Ainfluencer gives a Shopify seller three campaign types. They differ in what you pay, who reads the campaign first and which plan it needs, so choosing the route comes before anything else.

If you already run an affiliate program on another platform, choose Paid Collaboration and share your own tracking link. On the Free plan a campaign that promotes an outside affiliate program can be rejected, so that route needs a paid plan or a funded wallet. The full list of rejection reasons is in How to Launch a Campaign.

What being on Shopify adds to all three

Connect your Shopify store

Connecting takes a couple of minutes. The connection is made on the Ainfluencer Affiliate platform and then copied to your Ainfluencer account automatically, so one connection serves campaigns, gifting, shipping and affiliate programs.

What to know about the connection

Run an affiliate program

An affiliate program pays creators only when their link produces a sale. You set the rate on each product, creators join, and the commission is charged to your card once the returns window has passed.

Before you start: a store and a card

An affiliate campaign needs a connected store and a payment card. The card is what commissions are charged to. Without one you cannot create an affiliate campaign, the programs show Pending_payment_method, and campaigns that are already running are paused each night.

Add the card in the Payouts tab of the Affiliate dashboard. You are sent to a Stripe billing page and returned to the dashboard when it is saved. Read the card requirements printed beside the Add Card button before you add one. The note on that screen explains that this card is used only for affiliate commission payouts and is not charged for subscriptions.

Set a commission on each product

• New products arrive with a default commission of 15% until you change it.
• On the Free plan the lowest commission you can set is 25%. Paid plans have no minimum, which is the main reason an affiliate focused brand upgrades.
• Changing a commission also changes it on every existing partnership for that product, except partnerships where you agreed a custom rate. Partnered creators are notified, and the screen warns you that lowering a rate may upset them.
• Commission is calculated on the order lines for the product the creator’s link was for.

Turn products on and off

Each product has a status switch. An inactive product is hidden from creators, and links they already shared for it stop earning. Switching a whole store off switches all of its products off, and switching the store back on does not switch the products back on, so turn the ones you want on again one by one.

Create the campaign

1. Open the campaign type picker and choose Affiliate Campaign, then Track sales through Ainfluencer.
2. Pick Seller on Shopify and your store.
3. Fill in the campaign: name, start date, an optional end date, description, categories, the countries creators must be in (All is allowed) and an image.
4. Choose the products and confirm their commissions, then save. This is the moment it goes live. Affiliate campaigns are not reviewed by our team.

Until you save the products the campaign stays a draft and creators cannot see it. If you set an end date, the campaign finishes on that date and the partnerships made through it are closed the following night, so the links stop earning. Moving the end date later restarts the campaign but does not reopen partnerships that were already closed; creators need to join again.

How creators join

Creators find affiliate campaigns in the Ainfluencer mobile app. Joining is approved automatically and creates their tracked product links straight away, with no action from you. They need at least one Active social account on Ainfluencer, and you can send an affiliate link to a creator from the Ainfluencer inbox only if they have one too. A creator can hold a product under only one of your campaigns at a time, so joining a newer campaign that includes the same product moves it there, with that campaign’s commission for future sales. Their link keeps working.

Share and embed the campaign

The link button on a published affiliate campaign opens Share & Embed. It gives you the campaign’s public landing page address, share buttons for X, LinkedIn, Facebook and WhatsApp, and ready made HTML to embed a Banner, Widget, Badge or Email block on your own site.

When creators get paid, and what you are charged

That adds up to roughly five to seven weeks from a sale to the creator’s bank, and longer if your card fails, so tell your creators this up front. Every charge appears under More, then Payments in the seller app, with an invoice you can open. The creator’s side of the same system is in Affiliate Payout Structure.

Find creators and recruit affiliates

Two different searches, for two different jobs. Use Find Influencers for paid and gifted campaigns, and Affiliate Discovery for commission programs.

Find influencers for paid and gifted campaigns

Search asks which campaign you are recruiting for first, because that decides what the button on each card does: Invite to campaign, Request to send product, or Invite to program.

• Handles are masked until you reveal them. Your plan gives a monthly allowance of creator username reveals: Free 5, Starter 50, Pro 100, Ultimate 6,000. Extra reveals cost $1.00 on Free and Starter, $0.75 on Pro and $0.50 on Ultimate. Paying an offer reveals the creator for free.
• Save creators to named lists so you can re-run a search next quarter. Twenty to thirty prospects is a realistic batch.
• Invitations go out twice a day, at 06:00 and 18:00 UTC. They are held while a campaign is in review and deleted if it is rejected, so send them again after approval.

The full search guide is How to Find and Invite Creators.

Affiliate Discovery

Open Affiliates & Influencers, then Affiliate Discovery in the seller app. It lists registered affiliates who have an approved social account or website. You can filter by platform, category, partnership status, number of partners, location, gender, promotional methods and follower range on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest and X, or show only Pro Affiliates.

• Expanded Network lists creators Ainfluencer has imported who have not joined yet. Their emails stay hidden until you reveal them.
• Lists come in two kinds. A Manual List is one you fill yourself. A Smart List updates itself from your filters, and those filters are fixed once it is created.
• Email reveals are included on Starter (50), Pro (100) and Ultimate (6,000) and are not included on Free. Beyond the allowance you can pay $0.10 per email from your seller wallet. Reveals you have made stay revealed, and approving a partnership reveals that creator’s contact details for free.
• Talk to creators through the Ainfluencer chat.

Invite creators and manage partnerships

You can invite an affiliate to a whole store or to selected products. A card on file is required to invite or to accept. Your plan limits how many invitations you send: Free 5, Starter 50, Pro 500, Ultimate 50,000. Plan pages describe these allowances as monthly, while the counter in your user menu shows what you have used today, so trust the counter.

Accepting creates the contract and their tracked links. The Automatic Partnership Approval switch on your store approves applications without a custom commission instantly. It is switched on for all your stores when a paid subscription starts and off when there is no active subscription, so check it after any plan change.

Your public landing page

Each connected store gets a recruiting page automatically. On the store page choose Go to Landing, Copy Link, Share to or Customize. You can feature up to three products, hide the featured products section and hide the brand analytics, which are commission paid, revenue, clicks, units and conversions. For a Shopify store the address always uses your .myshopify.com name and cannot be changed. The page works while the store is active, and every plan includes it. Visitors who are not signed in can apply, but a new creator has to verify a social account or website on the affiliate platform before the request is completed.

Run a paid collaboration around a Shopify product

A paid collaboration is a brief that creators answer with a priced offer. Starting it from a Shopify product saves the writing, and the Shopify connection later lets you ship the product from the inbox.

Build the campaign

1. Choose Paid Collaboration in the type picker and click Let’s Go. This is where your plan’s campaign slot is checked.
2. Choose I am a Shopify user, select your store, and select the product the campaign is for.
3. Click Proceed with AI to pre fill the title, description, countries, gender, hashtags and product type from the product, and to copy up to nine product images in as content. Skip AI & Continue does neither. The product cannot be changed later, so a different product needs a new campaign.
4. Answer the brief one question per screen. Each answer saves as you go: what creators should do, follower size, gender, whether you ship a physical product, countries, language, how long the post stays up, a link in their bio, categories, hashtags, who can send offers, title and description, platforms and formats, and your brand description.
5. Upload at least one image or video. This is what submits the campaign. A campaign still marked Draft almost always has an upload step that was never saved.

Our team reads every paid collaboration before creators see it. The commonest reasons for sending one back are a thin description, too few visuals, a campaign that looks like a test, an empty About Us on your brand profile and contact details in the text or images. Fixing one takes a minute: click Edit, change what the email cited, and saving sends it back to the queue. The list is in How to Launch a Campaign.

Offers, payment and escrow

• Creators reply with priced offers. The minimum is $10. Paying an offer is how you accept it, and there is no separate accept button.
• The money goes into escrow, held in the creator’s locked wallet until you approve the delivery. If nobody approves, the deal fails on its timer and the money returns to your wallet.
• A platform fee is added on top of the agreed price and never comes out of what the creator receives: Free 25%, Starter 20%, Pro 15%, Ultimate 3%. A $200 deal costs $250, $240, $230 or $206.
• Contact details are hidden in the chat until you pay, and sharing unlocks the moment you do.
• Agree usage rights, such as running the content as a paid ad, in the chat before you pay. The offer records only the price, delivery date, duration and bio link.

Paying and funding are covered in How to Pay for an Offer and How to Fund and Manage Your Wallet.

Ship the product from Shopify

For a Shopify campaign, once an offer is paid, the Product Tracking box appears in the inbox.

1. Click Send via Shopify and pick the products. One unit of each is sent.
2. Confirm the address: the creator’s saved address, a different address you type in, or a request for the creator to provide it.
3. Ainfluencer creates a free order in your Shopify store with a 100% discount, completes it and creates the fulfilment. Nobody is charged, and you ship the item as usual.
4. After shipping, choose the carrier, enter the tracking number and click Submit & Track. The creator is notified, the box follows the parcel, and you both get a delivered notification.

Send products as gifts

Gifting means you send a free product and pay no fee. That single fact shapes everything else: there is no escrow, and if a creator does not post, what you have lost is the product.

Build the program

Choose Product Gifting & Seeding. The wizard saves each of its six steps as a draft.

1. Service. A title, and Self-serve (you approve creators and ship) or Managed (our team runs it by hand).
2. Products. At least one, from your Shopify store or typed in with a name, retail price and image.
3. Cadence. One time with a total number of units, or monthly. A start date is required and an end date is optional.
4. Recipients. Categories, audience size, platforms and languages, with optional requirements such as minimum engagement, age 18 or over, disclosure and competitor exclusivity.
5. Shipping. One ship from country, which must match your Shopify address, and the countries you ship to. Only creators in those countries are matched.
6. Review. Click Launch program. Your plan and a campaign slot are checked here, and our team then approves or rejects it.

Run the board

Each creator moves through columns, and you move most of the cards yourself: Pending Influencer Acceptance, Requested by Influencer, Accepted, Shipped, Received, Completed, Rejected and Archived. You see a creator’s shipping address once you accept their request, and the address locks when you move the card to Shipped. A Table view lists the same people, outreach templates send through the Ainfluencer chat, and Export downloads a CSV of everyone in the campaign except open requests.

• Invite creators from search once the program is approved. Filter on Address ready to ship, because a creator without a saved address cannot receive anything.
• Shopify fulfilment and parcel tracking apply to paid collaborations, not to gifting. Share the tracking number in the chat and move the card to Shipped the same day.

The complete walk through is How to Run a Gifting Campaign.

Measure what is happening

Your numbers live in two places: the Affiliate dashboard in the Ainfluencer web app, and the dashboard in the seller app.

The Affiliate dashboard in Ainfluencer

The Affiliates tab has a Reporting period bar: All, 7d, 30d, 90d, year to date or a custom range. It chooses which creators are listed, namely those who joined the campaign in that period, and the figures shown for them are their all time totals, not just the period. Choose All to see everyone. Campaign figures refresh whenever something changes and at least once an hour.

The seller app dashboard

Open the Advanced Affiliate Dashboard. It shows counters for your stores, products, affiliates, promotions and contracts, a Performance Report for the last week, your top products and top affiliates, and recent partnerships. Shopify activity is recorded by the tracking pixel as it happens, so the dashboard moves as shoppers click and buy.

For a view across paid collaborations too, your plan includes a monthly allowance of advanced analytics reports: Free 3, Starter 30, Pro 100, Ultimate 1,000. Extra reports cost $1.00 on Free, $0.75 on Starter and Pro and $0.25 on Ultimate.

Discount codes and what shoppers see

Shoppers never buy on Ainfluencer. They land on a product page, then complete the purchase in your Shopify store.

• A creator’s link opens a product page on the Ainfluencer shopper site with the product, your brand, who recommended it and any coupon. Buy Now opens your store with the creator’s tracking attached, and the order, payment, delivery and returns are all handled by you in Shopify.
• Discount codes. Basic discount codes that are active in your Shopify admin are imported automatically as public promotions and kept in step: a change or a deletion in Shopify is mirrored. Creators can attach one to their link.
• Shoppers see the code only when they are signed in to a free shopper account. Guests see a Login to See prompt.
• Create codes in the Shopify admin. Creating a promotion from the seller app with a Shopify store selected does not work yet, and the Coupons screen in the Ainfluencer web app is not connected to anything.
• If a product is out of stock or removed, or a link is revoked, the shopper is redirected according to the creator’s own redirect settings, for example to the creator’s storefront.

Which plan a Shopify seller needs

Everything above works on Free within its limits. These are the limits that decide when a Shopify seller outgrows it, as the plans are configured today.

Every plan includes the branded landing page and automatic payouts to affiliates. Quarterly and yearly billing are available on Starter, Pro and Ultimate, and a yearly plan works out at about 30% below the monthly price.

• Staying on Free is genuinely reasonable for one store, one campaign at a time and occasional paid deals.
• Starter is the plan that removes the 25% commission floor and opens gifting.
• Pro is the first plan with a second active store and two colleagues. Adding a teammate needs Pro, and there are no roles yet, so everyone has the same access as you, including spending your wallet.
• Ultimate adds unlimited stores, the 3% fee and a dedicated success manager.

The fee saving alone rarely pays for a plan. The gap between Free and Pro is ten points, so about $1,500 a month of creator spend saves roughly $150. Work out your own crossover before upgrading for the fee. Upgrades apply immediately and Stripe charges the difference. Downgrades and cancellations take effect at the end of the period you paid for, and anything over the new plan’s limits is then switched off automatically, so remove what you want to keep control of yourself first. See How Plans, Limits and Upgrades Work.

Questions Shopify sellers ask

Do I need to pay anything to connect my store?

No. Connecting is part of your account. What your plan changes is how many stores run at once and how low a commission you can set.

Can I use Ainfluencer if my store is on a different platform?

Affiliate programs need a Shopify or Amazon connection. Paid collaborations and gifting work for any store. Non-Shopify/Amazon & Integrations explains the options.

How are Shopify sales tracked?

The Ainfluencer tracking pixel installed in your store records page views, add to carts and completed purchases that come through a creator’s link. Ainfluencer does not read the rest of your Shopify orders, apart from the free orders it creates when you ship a product to a creator.

Why does my program say Inactive?

Your plan limits how many stores run at once and the new one could not be switched on. Switch another off and this one on in the seller app, or upgrade.

Why does it say Pending_payment_method?

The program is active but has no payout card. Add one in the Payouts tab.

Why can I not set a lower commission?

Free has a 25% floor. A lower rate needs a paid plan.

Why are my products still hidden after I reconnected?

Turning a store off hides its products, and turning it back on does not switch them on. Activate the ones you want in My Products.

How do I talk to a creator?

Use the Ainfluencer chat. After a partnership is approved you also get the creator’s contact details.

Can I run an affiliate program and a paid collaboration at the same time?

Yes, as two campaigns, and each holds one of your campaign slots. The single combined campaign type is not available yet.