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Good morning - Eric here. My two word summary for the DTC zeitgeist today? Cautious but energized. What are your two? Reply to this email…
🛍️ AI-Referred Orders on Shopify Up 13x Year Over Year
Shopify’s Q1 2026 commerce data shows AI referral traffic taking off. Sessions from AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini grew more than 8x year over year on Shopify stores.
This @ecommcowboy interview with Mani Fazeli, Shopify’s VP of Product, highlighted that orders from those sessions grew nearly 13x.
The bigger point is how these shoppers are behaving. Fazeli reports that generally they convert at a 50% higher rate than organics, and spend about 14% more per order. Talk about condensing the customer journey.
Perfect timing for Shopify’s newly released agentic section that gives you visibility into how AI is discovering, surfacing, and recommending your products. Go check it out if you haven’t.
👉 Do this week: Make your store readable to machines. Audit your product schema and feeds so agents can pull your pricing and stock status. Confirm your catalog is syndicating to the AI shopping surfaces Shopify connects to. Then break out AI referral traffic in your analytics so you can measure the channel.
Ask your ChatGPT or Claude things like "What drove revenue this week?" or "What are my campaigns missing right now?", and get answers powered by your live Omnisend data.
This update lets you turn your store’s marketing signals into instant insights. This means you can better understand your revenue attribution, campaign performance, and customer behavior in seconds.
150,000+ brands already run on Omnisend, seeing an average $79 earned for every $1 spent, and up to 35% lower costs for the same marketing power.
Plus, migration is free, which means you can switch in as little as 5 days without disruption.
See what your data is really saying - check out how it works.
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Shopify shipped an AI media buyer. Most of you can't try it yet.
ICYMI last week: Shopify rolled out Campaign Autopilot - it’s an AI agent that runs paid campaigns across Meta, Shop and email straight from your admin (with more reported channels on the way).
It's early access for now, qualifying stores only, so plenty of operators (like Kurt Elster) are still on the waitlist. If you get access and test it out, let us know how it goes!
🇪🇺 Shopify turned EU withdrawal compliance into a toggle
Like we mentioned last week, if you sell to shoppers in the EU, you're legally on the hook for the buyer's right to withdraw, and Shopify just made it native.
Self-serve returns now handle order cancellations too, and you can set the rules per market: a default policy storewide, with overrides for individual markets.
Sell in the EU and have no idea what I’m talking about? Check this out.
You’ve seen the format: a creator talking straight into the front camera, ranting about one hyper-specific thing until you forget it's an ad.
Pilothouse told me they’re called yapper ads, and the format is quietly crushing in Meta accounts right now.
Here’s an example of the ad style in action from @bbriantrinh on X if you want to take a look.
One client, a $4M/year fashion brand, ran yapper-style UGC against their usual creative for a female audience.
Here were the results:
You can see plain and clear that the yapper ad drove about 65% of revenue and 70% of purchases at roughly $11 lower CAC.
Here’s why they’re carrying right now:
The team told me that the ideal length for one of these is around the 1-2 minute mark.
With the strong engagement, they typically drive high intent buyers to the site and CVR can be strong for audiences coming from these ads.
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Apple spent decades building one of the most iconic brands on Earth, and Aves makes the case that the playbook that got them there won't carry a legacy brand through today’s algorithm-driven feed.
This episode of Ad-venturous digs into the Think Different campaign as a positioning masterclass, why consistency is the real signal of brand success, and the split between Air Game and Ground Game marketing.
Here's the stat that should stop you scrolling: 50% of consumers lose trust in a brand the moment they think the content was written by AI.
Kemberly Gong, VP of Marketing at Contentful, joined me on the podcast to break down the Great Content Collapse: 60% of Google searches now end with zero clicks, and LLMs already drive 5% of traffic and climbing. Gong shares actionable insights and her 30-day content audit for the agentic web.
Plus, how small changes to personalize your website for customers result in big performance wins. The proof is in the case studies: Pets Deli's saw a 50% conversion lift from personalizing promotions for site visitors during Black Friday, Ruggable increased CTR by 7x during BFCM.
▶️ Listen here for a 30 day content audit checklist | 🎧 Listen on Spotify
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