• by Colin Kirkland , January 10, 2024

Elon Musk’s X has announced a new deal with e-commerce platform Shopify that offers Shopify merchants more opportunities to promote their products on the social media platform. 

Not much is known about the details of the deal, aside from a post made by the X Business account on Tuesday, which stated that the partnership will enable “all Shopify merchants to reach even more customers by leveraging the power of X.”

Twitter executive Joe Benarroch also posted about the partnership’s future goals. For starters, X wants to utilize Shopify’s sales channel to bring more awareness to the platform, which could be in response to the app’s recent downturn in user engagement. 

Both companies also want to “make it seamless to upload product catalogs onto X,” help merchants “optimize their ad dollars to maximize their outcomes on X” and “highlight the role X plays in a merchant’s marketing stack.”

Harley Finkelstein, the president of Shopify, added that the new partnership will give Shopify merchants more exposure. 

“A determining factor in the success of your business is the ability to reach customers wherever they are,” Finkelstein said. “More platforms, more choice, more entrepreneurship. More details to come.”

This isn’t a first for the microblogging platform.

In 2022, when X was still named Twitter, it announced a partnership with Shopify that allowed affiliated merchants to list their products on their Twitter Professional Profiles. When a product was clicked on, it would redirect consumers to the Shopify product page where they could then buy the product.

By helping facilitate merchant sales in-stream, X is inching closer to Musk’s plan to turn the platform into an “everything app” that resembles WeChat, China’s app used by billions of people to grocery shop, text, video conference, play games, follow the news and make digital payments. 

Musk seems most interested in the latter capability, securing a license to enable funds transfers in various U.S. states back in July that allows companies to send, receive, and transfer funds among users, nationally and internationally, as well as facilitating currency exchanges and issuing prepaid cards all through X.

Although X is a long way off from making this a reality, the partnership with Shopify shows that Musk has not given up on this plan.