• by Ray Schultz , January 3, 2023

Advertisers have new opportunity: Shopify’s Audiences, a targeting platform that will let them find and reach out to lookalike consumers.  

The goal is to help the industry get around Apple’s privacy restrictions, including those affecting tracking and location data use, reports state. But it could also provide brands with an alternative to normal publishing channels and in that way can be viewed as competitive.

Audiences lets merchants upload customer data to Meta and Google and in that mix find similar customers “who might be more likely to buy their products because they bought similar items from another retailer,” said Harley Finkelstein, president of Canada-based Shopify, according to the Financial Times. 

There is one big question: Will advertisers be comfortable uploading their data in this way?  

“While retailers may be hesitant to contribute data that will be pooled and then used by other merchants — who could include their competitors — they also see their participation in Shopify Audiences as a way to reach new potential customers based on data from Instagram, Google and YouTube, according to the report,” Pymnts writes. 

In this way, Audiences sounds like the old co-operative databases that were used in publishing and in the mail order business.

In other Shopify news, the company says it has signed up Mattel Inc. for its new product: Commerce Components, according to Reuters. 

Brands can, for a subscription fee, avail themselves of checkout and other back-office services, Reuters writes.