Shopify’s Shop app will be front and center this holiday season

The expression “Christmas in July” is not just about summer sales for retailers; it also applies to the time they start preparing for the holiday season.

And for the first time, Shopify is planning to aggressively push its Shop app, the hub of all its shopping activity, during the upcoming holiday season for a much longer period, Jess Jacobs, VP of consumer marketing and head of growth for the Shop app, told Retail Brew.

Holiday shopping has been starting earlier and people have gotten into the rhythm of buying most things they need before Black Friday-Cyber Monday.

“We plan to have a multiphase holiday period during a much longer window than previous [years], and we don’t want to inundate with the same message over and over throughout the entirety of [the] holiday season,” Jacobs told Retail Brew on the sidelines of a Shop app event in New York City.

Shop app—which tracks packages, orders, and serves up recommendations for new brands to buy—has spent the last six months touting its growth story to more merchants. Brands like Glossier, Caraway, and Allbirds are all sellers on the app. Features like the new AI-powered search function and Shop Posts, which lets merchants publish shoppable posts like Reels on Instagram directly in the Shop feed, have been drawing merchants in.

According to Mark William Lewis, founder of e-commerce agency Netalico, which helps brands set up on Shopify, the company is trying to “pitch” the Shop app against other traffic sources like ChatGPT.

“They’re trying to make the case that this is a serious [growth] channel [for merchants],” he said.

“We really want to showcase Shop across these multitude of different seasons and really be there for many more [merchants] than we have in the past,” Jacobs added.

Shop app’s native gross merchandise value (GMV) grew more than 70% in Q2, and Cart Sync, a feature that automatically connects items in a customer’s shopping cart to an online store on the Shop app, contributed more than 30% of Shop app’s GMV in Q2, the company said.

The Shop app, which launched in 2020, was originally intended to track Shopify packages. But it has evolved to become a channel to acquire new customers. Shopify previously told Retail Brew it has more than 250 million verified shoppers who use both the Shop app and Shop Pay, Shopify’s express checkout function.

“[The] Shop app is really starting to grow,” Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said during the company’s last earnings call. “We have a lot of work there, especially as things like Catalog and the agentic application get built into it. I would say that both agentic and the Shop app are two major legs of our stool for the future.”