Need an affiliate marketing app that can help you discover new creators, give them a unique link, and track their performance? If you’re already a Shopify user, Shopify Collabs is a natural fit for when you’re starting out with influencer marketing campaigns.

But what are the shortcomings you should be prepared for, and what happens when you outgrow it? In this article, I’ll share when you should stick to Shopify Collabs and when it’s time to switch to a more robust app that meets your needs as they evolve.

Let’s start with a quick summary of how Modash compares with Shopify Collabs:

When should you use Shopify Collabs?

Shopify Collabs is an excellent choice if you check at least two of the the following boxes:

• You need something free and easy to use: One of the primary benefits of Shopify Collabs is that it’s free to use on all Shopify plans (except for the Starter and Retail plans). And it’s really simple to use – whether you’re the marketer behind the store or the creator signing up. Signing up, setting up your account, and understanding the platform is slick and smooth. Since it’s a natural extension of Shopify itself, it integrates seamlessly into your store, too – no complex setup involved.
  
• You’re just beginning your influencer marketing efforts and are already hosting your store on Shopify: You don’t need complex systems and workflows when you’re just getting started with influencer marketing. Instead, you need something simple and low-risk. Shopify Collabs fits the bill because it lets you kickstart your affiliate program without spending a dime. Discovering new influencers (albeit from a limited pool) is easy, and so is setting up their unique links.
  
• You want to run a scalable, tiered affiliate program at no cost without vetting creators: Shopify’s Collabs Network allows anyone to discover your products and become an affiliate. You can set a commission for all your products (or a collection of products), and anyone can join your affiliate program. You can also onboard creators separately and divide them into various tiers with different commissions and products. Shopify Collabs is a good choice if you want to scale your affiliate program and aren’t picky about the creators who get your affiliate links.
  

If you check at least two of the above three boxes, you can justify spending time and resources using Shopify Collabs. That said, you might need a more sophisticated app if:

• You’re new to influencer marketing but want to begin with paid partnerships or any other type of influencer collaboration. Shopify Collabs exclusively runs affiliate campaigns (with limited gifting elements, like allowing an affiliate to choose products to promote).
  
• You want to run a scalable affiliate program but wish to vet creators (at least to some degree). Anyone can enter and use affiliate links for your store once you toggle on the Collabs Network. That’s a cross you must bear to run a scalable affiliate program at no cost. You can opt to turn the Collabs Network off and invite influencers you’ve vetted to your affiliate program, but you’re still doing a lot of that legwork yourself.
  
• You need to scale without adding a ton of manual tasks. Shopify’s influencer database is limited, and you can’t track influencer content. You’ll outgrow Shopify Collabs in a very short time. It can’t scale with you unless you pair it with influencer content tracking and influencer discovery software.

5 signs you’ve outgrown Shopify Collabs

As your influencer marketing strategy evolves, you might outgrow Shopify Collabs. Here are five signs to watch out for:

1: You’re starting to run out of potential influencer partners

Shopify Collab’s influencer database is quite limited. For starters, only creators from the U.S., U.K., and Canada can discover your brand and apply to become one of your affiliates. This alone significantly reduces your pool of influencers – especially if you’re a global brand.

If you look at it from an outreach perspective, the options are still limited. You only get four filters to choose from:

• Location of an influencer
• Number of followers or subscribers
• Keywords influencers use in their bio, username, or posts
• Social media platform (Shopify Collabs has Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, and X)

The number of influencers on Shopify Collabs is unclear – it’s somewhere in the millions. But sooner or later, you’ll either run out of potential creator partners or be unable to vet them properly for your campaigns.

That’s why we do things differently at Modash. You can find any creator’s profile with over 1K followers across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. That’s over 300M influencers – and the number’s only growing 🤯

Plus, you need filters beyond the basics. In Modash, we have all the filters Shopify Collabs has and then some:

• An influencer’s age, gender, interest, and growth rate
• Last-post filter to find influencers who are actively posting
• Engagement rate, hashtags, bio, and topics they post about

The cherry on top: Modash also helps you filter for an influencer’s audience. After all, it’s equally crucial to ensure a creator has your ICP in their audience (in addition to finding an influencer who’s a brand fit). You can filter for an influencer’s audience on various parameters:

• Audience location, gender, age, and language
• Audience interests
• Percentage of fake followers

The percentage filter helps you drill down further about who exactly you want to reach.

(Pro tip: We recommend using just a few filters at first, and then adding in more to get a list of potential influencers. Too many filters at once might superficially reduce your list of results.)

Modash’s expansive database of influencers paired with its advanced filters help you discover better collab matches from a much wider pool – including the gems your competitors haven’t found yet 😉

2: You want to build stronger and longer-term influencer relationships

Influencer marketing is all about relationships. Shopify Collabs will get the ball rolling with new affiliates, but what if you want to diversify your influencer marketing strategy and foster more long-term creator relationships? Shopify Collabs is not adept at handling that yet.

Models like Modash equip you with more sophisticated relationship management tools. For example, here are three things you can do in Modash that aren’t currently possible in Shopify Collabs:

• Track the status of your influencer outreach using labels – and filter those labels so you know who to ping again
• Communicate with influencers directly using an integrated inbox
• Always have the full picture using labels, notes, and documents available on the side so you can refer back to your notes and a creator’s data while you’re communicating with them

3: You need more control over who promotes your brand

The biggest con about the Collabs Network is that anyone can join it. You can’t approve or deny creators.

In Modash, you can vet creators as thoroughly as you want to. Every creator has a dedicated, in-depth profile telling you their recent posts, paid partnerships (and their performance), audience’s interests, and so much more.

Your influencer partners are a representation of your brand online. Sooner or later, you’ll want some control over selecting creators who are a brand fit and can present your company and its products precisely the way you want.

4: Your stakeholders are asking for more thorough reports

Influencer marketing reporting is a crucial aspect of getting buy-in from your leaders. You need the numbers to prove the impact you’ve made, whether that’s on brand awareness or the bottom line. Unfortunately, Shopify Collabs is of little help here.

There are five potential issues if you rely on Shopify Collabs alone for reporting purposes:

• It can’t track influencer content. You can’t see what a creator has posted and when, or how it’s performing.
  
• It can’t tell you exactly how much you’ve paid creators. Shopify Collabs has combined the billing for using their platform with affiliate commission payouts. This lumps together two separate bills (although divided by categories) and makes it even more complicated when determining, analyzing, and reporting on where your influencer marketing budget went.
  
• It has minor inefficiencies in dissecting data. Shopify Collabs can tell you how many sales each creator brought in. It can also tell you how many conversions your affiliate program generated in a given period. But it can’t tell you who was your highest performing affiliate for a given month. Shopify Collabs doesn’t have a polished reporting system yet – so you can’t filter reports the way you want to – unless you do it all manually.
  
• It has a processing fee for each creator payment. Shopify Collabs charges a 2.9% processing fee for every commission payment. This percentage might seem small, but it adds up as you scale your affiliate program. It can be difficult to report on, too, especially when you consider the combined billing system.
  
• It has a holding period for paying creators. Shopify Collabs pays creators after a minimum of a 30-day holding period (up to 90 days). As you scale, this holding period can create confusion on when a creator posted about you vs. when they got paid.

Modash solves all of this without you lifting a finger.

• It tracks all influencer content – even Instagram Stories (beyond the 24-hour time cap).
• You can figure out exactly how much you’ve paid creators in any given period in a couple of clicks.
• You can monitor your campaign performance with even more data points and get a solid overview of the ROI.

Modash even flags content whose creators haven’t used your targeted hashtag, keyword, or ad disclosure.

The best part? Modash also allows you to track all influencer content under Event Mode. In this feature, Modash will track every single piece of content a creator publishes for a specific date range. Even if an influencer forgets to use your hashtag or tag your brand, you don’t miss a beat because you can handpick and add influencer content under Event Mode to specific campaigns to make accurate reports!

5: You’re ready for something more efficient

Shopify Collabs can get the job done – but it requires a lot of manual work to get results.

Take its gifting feature, for example: if you want creators to choose a product from your catalog, you need to enter all your products and send them these choices manually. That’s fine when you have one or ten products, but what happens when you have 200? You can’t send a whole collection using Shopify Collabs. So you’ll have to manually add hundreds of products whenever you want a creator to choose a few from your extensive catalog.

It’s a minor inconvenience, but these add up real quick. Before you know it, you’re spending more time than you should on manual tasks that can easily be automated if you add a new tool to the mix.

For example, Modash makes influencer gifting ultra simple. You can attribute a specific collection that you’ve already created in Shopify without manually adding products SKU by SKU (I mean, you can also do that if you really want to. We won’t stop you).

Modash automatically tags the orders as Modash gift in Shopify, so it’s clear which orders are coming from the influencers you’ve gifted.

From there, you assign the order to the influencer you’d like to gift, and then you can send them an email with their unique discount code and free delivery code directly from Modash’s inbox. Modash will also automatically generate those codes from your Shopify store, so you can gift products in seconds – without having to swap back and forth between tabs and platforms.

When your influencer opens the link, they’ll see a custom product page with the products or collection you’ve selected. They’ll be able to choose the products you’ve selected (including any variations, like color or size, and enter their shipping address. Their discount is already applied, so all they’ll have to do is apply the free delivery code.

You’ll even be able to track each gifting order from Modash, see when orders have been fulfilled (or not).

It’s time for an upgrade

Shopify Collabs is a no-brainer when you’re a Shopify merchant just starting out with influencer marketing. But with its current capabilities, you’ll quickly grow out of it.

You don’t need to let go of Shopify Collabs completely if you’re already running your affiliate program on it. But you can layer another influencer marketing tool – like Modash – on top of it, especially for influencer discovery and content tracking.

Lucky you, because Modash integrates with Shopify seamlessly. Just connect your Shopify store to Modash, and you can gift your products to influencers, track the order and their performance using discount codes or UTM links, and report on it all from one tool.

Talk about making influencer marketing a breeze, right? Don’t take just my word for it: try Modash for free, no credit card needed.