SPONSOREDÂ BY:
Good morning. Happy day-after-Editions. Shopify shipped so much AI yesterday it's practically slinging sales on its own. Call it the slingularity.
First upâŚ
đ Shopify just put every AI channel's sales in one dashboard
Your Shopify admin now shows sales from ChatGPT, Copilot, Google's AI Mode, the Gemini app, and Shop in one view. The new Agentic Storefronts panel shipped today as part of the Spring '26 Edition, and it's the one update worth opening your admin for.
It also shows the top AI queries in your category and which ones you're losing, so for the first time you can see where shoppers ask AI for products like yours and get sent to a competitor. When you're surfacing but not converting, Sidekick tells you what to fix, usually thin titles or missing specs.
It's real money: Omnilux says AI channels drove 3.2% of revenue in March, and Cozy Earth reports AI-channel revenue up 20x YoY. Go check your number.
đ¤ Shopify can now manage your Meta campaign?
Shopify also dropped Campaign Autopilot today which lets merchants have Shopifyâs AI fully manage their Meta (and other platform) campaigns start to finish. Set a budget, set your goal, Shopify handles the rest and gets you sales.
Harley says it's designed for merchants who can't yet afford an agency, but also mentioned that heâs using it on Firebelly tea right now (his side brand) and itâs doing âincredibly wellâ.
Weâve seen a few of these coming out over the past few weeks - pretty wild times we live in. Give it a shot and report back to us!
đ§ Sidekick can now actually do the work
Sidekick used to just answer questions. Now it can go into your other apps and take action for you, starting with Klaviyo, Loop, Smile, and Judge.me. It also keeps working in the background while you move on to something else, shows up on every screen of the mobile app (and your Apple Watch), and gives you a short list of what to fix at the start of each admin session.
Nik Sharma has spent years helping scale some of the fastest-growing DTC brands. For most of that time, CTV wasn't part of the conversation.
What changed? Measurement caught up. Brands can now target, retarget, and measure CTV campaigns just like they do on Meta.
The attention gap got too big to ignore. Viewers spend 12x more time per session on CTV than social, but brands still spend 3x more budget on social.
đ So Nik brought Emily Huo, Paramount's SVP of SMB Advertising, into his first-ever Limited Supply virtual event.
Inside, they cover:
*Â sponsored
â𧢠Dad Hats To Gary Vee
Dad Gang, the fatherhood brand three friends (including friend of DTC, Bart Szaniewski) started in 2022 with $750 and 100 hats, now at $35M+ in lifetime revenue and over 1M hats sold, has brought on Gary Vaynerchuk as its first outside partner and strategic advisor. He'll advise on growth, content, and community expansion, telling press he's "got a fun feeling this business is going to get much, much bigger." Congrats guys! Full article here.
(And if you want to hear more about how they scaled, check out the pod we did with him here recently.)
đŽ Mantle is shutting down - what Shopify merchants should know
Mantle, a behind-the-scenes platform that powered billing, analytics, and customer tools for Shopify app developers, announced on June 16 that it's winding down completely. Most services go dark August 14, with billing customers given until September 30 to migrate.
Do you need to care? Mostly no - Mantle was infrastructure for the people who build Shopify apps, not for stores. Your shop won't go down, and your apps won't vanish, theyâll find solutions. But potentially expect your favorite apps to need to make some changes. Check out a tweet laying it out here.
đ AI-referred visitors are now converting 54% better than regular traffic
Adobe put out a report on AI traffic this week and the travel headline is not the point. The retail number is. AI-referred visitors are now converting 54% better than regular traffic. Last year it was half the rate. Fully flipped in twelve months. AI traffic converting better than search traffic. A year ago that sentence would have meant nothing.
More than a third of retail site content is invisible to AI systems though. Image-heavy pages, JavaScript, PDFs. AI can't read any of it and you'd never know.
Scroll back up and check that Shopify Agentic Storefronts panel. Find out if you're getting AI traffic before you find out the hard way you've been missing it.
Jordan Gordon audits email programs constantly. The thing he keeps seeing: brands cranking out 24 campaigns a month just to stay in the inbox. The calendar demands it, so you find something to say. Usually that thing is âlast chanceâ for the 6th time this month (yes, we notice).
The Recommendations Flow he walks through in this episode fixes this. It handles inbox placement automatically so your campaigns can go back to being about things people actually want to open. Drops. Real sales. New stuff. Not another discount on the thing you already discounted twice this week.
Remember when you could throw five fresh ads into an ad set and trust Meta to surface the winner? Me too.
Now Meta dumps almost the entire budget into one or two ads inside a campaign, and the other creatives you sweated over never get a real impression.
So you're not actually testing anything. You're watching Meta re-crown whatever it crowned on day one.
The fix is Meta's Creative Testing tool, already sitting in Ads Manager. The Pilothouse Meta team told me theyâve been running it across a handful of DTC accounts.
If you want to try it yourself, hereâs the steps to follow:
1ď¸âŁ In Ads Manager, go to the ad level of an existing campaign and scroll to the "Creative testing" heading.
2ď¸âŁ Click Set up test. You'll choose the number of ads, the minimum daily spend on the test ads, the test duration, and your KPI.
3ď¸âŁ Hit Confirm, and Meta duplicates your ad into fresh shells for you to edit.
4ď¸âŁ Swap in your new creative and publish.
The test kicks off on its own, and your new ads pull a slice of spend inside the existing campaign. When it wraps, the ads keep delivering until you pause them, and results show up in the Experiments tab. Set it once and let it tell you which creative actually deserves the budget Meta's been hoarding.
âđ Selling on Walmart Marketplace is one of this year's smartest investments. New Seller Savings 2026 is happening now. Sign up to unlock up to $75K in New Seller Savings to build your business on Walmart Marketplace.* Conditions apply.
*Â sponsored
Did you find this valuable? Support us by checking out our businesses:
Please note that items in this newsletter marked with * contain sponsored content.
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
