Australian merchants can now reach Shop app shoppers through one campaign, with no design work and no cost until a sale happens.
Shopify is rolling out Shop Campaigns to merchants in Australia, expanding an advertising tool that was previously limited to the US and Canada.
The pitch is straightforward: businesses set the price they’re willing to pay to acquire a customer, and they’re only charged when a sale actually happens, not for impressions or clicks that go nowhere.
Shop Campaigns lets merchants promote products through a single campaign that reaches the Shop app and, eventually, third-party channels including Meta, Google, X, Snap and Pinterest. There’s no creative to produce and no advertising pixels to install. For merchants in the US and Canada, that full multi-channel version is already live, and Shopify’s own materials describe it extending even further there, into channels like ChatGPT, Pinterest and OpenWeb. For Australia and other new markets, the rollout starts with the Shop app itself, with Meta and Google integration described as “coming soon”.
Setting a campaign up is designed to take only a few minutes. Merchants choose a base cost they’re willing to pay per customer, set a target order value and daily budget, then pick which countries to target. Shopify recommends starting with a daily budget that allows for at least five conversions, and setting the acquisition cost at around half the average order value, since a more competitive cost tends to get products shown more prominently to shoppers.
When a shopper clicks a promoted product, they land on a product page inside the Shop app, which Shopify describes as a shopping destination used by hundreds of millions of verified shoppers worldwide. Merchants don’t need separate ad accounts or market-specific campaigns to reach them, and can manage budgets and billing in local currency.
Shaun Broughton, Managing Director for APAC and Japan at Shopify, framed the update as a response to a specific pain point for local businesses. “In Australia’s competitive retail market, finding new customers is one of the biggest challenges businesses face, and too often it comes with unnecessary cost and complexity,” he said. “The expansion of Shop Campaigns to Australia gives businesses a simpler way to reach millions of shoppers already looking to buy. They only pay when a customer converts, spend less time managing campaigns across multiple platforms, and can focus more on growing their business.”
Natasha Whiting, CEO and co-founder of Kollo Health, offered an early reaction after setting up the tool locally. “It looks like a game-changer for us as a brand, setup was easy and flawless, and it all makes total sense. Cannot wait for it to start working,” she said. Her comment reflects onboarding, not results, since Kollo Health hasn’t yet reported outcomes from running a live campaign.
For a sense of what the tool has delivered elsewhere, Shopify has published its own case studies from the US and Canadian rollout. The footwear brand OluKai reported a 12% increase in average order value and more than 1,400 new customers over a four-week campaign, according to Shopify, and has since kept Shop as a permanent part of its acquisition mix. Homegoods brand Caraway’s VP of growth, Connor Dault, was quoted saying the appeal was avoiding the usual setup burden of gathering assets and installing pixel tracking. These figures come from a different market, over a different period, and were published by Shopify itself rather than independently verified, so they describe what happened in North America, not a guarantee of what Australian merchants will see.
That distinction matters, because Shopify hasn’t yet released Australia-specific figures on merchant uptake, typical acquisition costs, or comparative savings against running ads directly through Meta or Google. The claims that hold up on their own terms are structural: no upfront cost, no charge for non-converting clicks, and full multi-channel reach still pending locally. Whether Australian merchants see anything like the results reported overseas is something only local campaign data, once it exists, will be able to answer.
For now, merchants weighing whether to try it have a low-risk entry point, since there’s more detail on the Shop Campaigns rollout available directly from Shopify.
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