• by Colin Kirkland , Yesterday

As it moves to expand its ad business, Reddit has partnered with WooCommerce, launching an integration designed to connect the ecommerce platform’s millions of digital storefronts to the social media network while offering a variety of ad tools, according to a recent announcement.

Similar to Snapchat’s recent partnership with WooCommerce, Reddit’s integration connects merchants’ WooCommerce store to Reddit’s ad system, automatically enabling Reddit Pixel and Conversations API (CAPI), which promises reliable data retrieval, ad targeting and optimization. 

The integration also syncs merchants’ product catalogs to Reddit Ads Manager, refreshing the catalog automatically as pricing and product availability change. Within the Ads Manager, merchants also have the option to create “Dynamic Product Ads,” which combine shopping signals with machine learning and advertiser product catalogs.

WooCommerce, which allows Wordpress users to turn their websites into online stores, has become a mainstay in the ecommerce world since 2011, now powering over a quarter of all online stores. 

Last year, over 6 million live websites were using WooCommerce across the globe, according to a report by BuiltWith. 

Reddit’s head of SMB product Harish Balasubramanian said in the company announcement that the partnership with WooCommerce is meant to help merchants reduce their time and technical burdens when attempting to run ads on Reddit, especially ahead of the holiday season.  

The move highlights Reddit’s recent updates aimed at smaller businesses -- in particular, changes made to its Ads Manager last spring, designed to help SMBs target niche communities within the social network’s thousands of subreddits.