ShopMy Doubles Down on Its E-Commerce Ambitions

Business of Fashion

4 days ago

ShopMy wants to be a destination for shopping, not scrolling.
This week, the influencer monetisation service will relaunch its website with revamped storefronts for creators that will automatically populate with every product they link to on Instagram, TikTok, Substack or other platforms. The storefront is designed to simplify finding past products a creator has shared; rather than digging through past posts in hopes of locating a link, followers can simply search for the desired item on said creator's ShopMy page. An app offering similar features will follow in the coming months, said ShopMy co-founder Tiffany Lopinsky and Harry Rein, ShopMy's chief executive and co-founder.
It's a major push from ShopMy, which provides the tools for influencers to sell products to their followers via affiliate links, gifted items and sponsored posts, to position itself as an e-commerce platform in its own right. It's also another way to differentiate itself from rival LTK, which has leaned further into content: this past February, LTK unveiled its own overhaul, introducing more features designed to encourage creators to post about more than products they'd like followers to buy.
'We're still not a content destination,' said Rein. 'We want people to post on Instagram and TikTok, and we'll do all the behind-the-scenes work so when someone actually wants to shop, they can come to us.'
The idea, according to Lopinsky, is to create a place that will permanently host and organise all the products they share, so followers can easily go find them later. For example, if a follower remembers loving a bathing suit a creator posted months ago on Stories, rather than digging through their highlights in hopes of finding a link, they can simply go to their ShopMy page and search for it.
The changes come six months after ShopMy announced it had raised $77.5 million at a $410 million valuation, led by venture capital firms Bessemer Venture Partners and Bain Capital Ventures. Competition in the affiliate marketing space continues to heat up as more and more consumers — not just traditional creators and influencers — use the platforms to make a few extra bucks off of their own recommendations. ShopMy now has 150,000 creators and over 1,000 brands as a part of its network, up from 50,000 last spring.
Also in the works is a ShopMy app, which is set to debut by the beginning of next year. Its arrival will put ShopMy even more directly in competition with LTK, which has centred much of its growth efforts in recent years around its own app.
It also carries some risks. As recently as last year, Lopinsky told The Business of Fashion that the company had no plans to create an app. ShopMy, which was founded in 2020, grew rapidly by offering services that the better-established LTK didn't. One frequent complaint: that LTK was trying to steer too much activity onto its own app at the expense of creators whose businesses were centred on Instagram or TikTok.
But the change in tune, Lopinsky said, is a natural next step.
'We view creators as retailers … and for the places that you shop at the most, you probably have their app,' she said.
One of the website features set to arrive this week is 'Circles,' which functions as a grouped storefront for multiple influencers. ShopMy has curated some of these itself — there's one for interior design experts, for example, and another for fashion industry insiders, made up of former editors and buyers — but users can also create their own Circles.
'[Each storefront] is like their own boutique, but a circle is like a mini department store that's made of what all the people you follow are finding across the internet,' said Lopinsky.
Most of the other new features are designed to improve the shopping experience on the app: Users will also be able to create wishlists of their top products, sort storefronts by most favourited items and read independent product reviews, powered by the recommendation platform Thingtesting, which ShopMy acquired in May.
The hope, Rein said, is that all these features will help ShopMy not only grow its name recognition among consumers as a shopping destination, but its use as a customer retention tool for brands.
'We just want to keep pushing the boundary of 'If you're going to put an incremental dollar in, you should put it through these people that love your product, that talk about it,'' he said.