Ecommerce partnerships help brands reach new audiences, build trust, and drive sales without relying on one channel alone.
Total sales in the US ecommerce industry reached $302.3 billion in the first quarter of 2026. The online retail experience has also grown in complexity: even for everyday essentials like food and household supplies, Salsify’s 2026 data shows 83% of shoppers use more than one channel.
When discovery is fragmented and paid channels are crowded, ecommerce partnerships let you borrow trust and reach from creators, affiliates, and complementary brands.
This guide shares how to manage collaborations across each partnership channel, with techniques to find and activate new brand partners.
What are ecommerce partnerships?
An ecommerce partnership is a formal agreement between an online store and another business or individual. They can be between two complementary brands or online businesses that tap into influencers, referral partners, and affiliates.
Partnerships can show up as:
- Co-branded bundles
- Joint giveaways or contests
- Affiliate programs
- Shared campaigns
“The ultimate goal for a partnership is getting your brand in front of a whole audience that most likely hasn’t heard of you or at least hasn’t tried your products, but is going to now,” says Amrit Richmond, founder of Indie CPG.
Benefits of partnerships for ecommerce companies
Ecommerce partnerships help you extend your reach, build trust with your audience, improve the shopping experience, and gather feedback.
Extend reach and brand awareness
An ecommerce partnership marketing strategy can expand your reach, introducing you to new potential customers and market segments.
Jewelry brand Mejuri, for example, collaborated with Shop app to host an event where attendees got a scratch card with varying amounts of Shop Cash to spend in-store. They invited tennis pro and brand ambassador Emma Navarro to the event, which drew thousands of visitors to the store—half of whom discovered Mejuri for the first time.
Build trust through transparent recommendations
When a brand recommends your product to their audience, they’re lending you the trust they’ve already earned. Tinned fish brand Fishwife saw this firsthand in their collaboration with Fly by Jing.
“We saw increased credibility from being associated with this brand that had solidified its reputation a couple of years before we did,” says Becca Millstein, cofounder and CEO of Fishwife.
The same applies to influencer partnerships: BBB National Programs’ 2025 research found that 58% of consumers have made a purchase based on a creator’s recommendation.
But trust is earned when relationships are clear and recommendations are honest. The same BBB study found that 71% of consumers cite transparency and honesty about brand association as a driver of trust. Seven in 10 feel deceived when influencers fail to disclose paid or free product relationships.
Aside from just building goodwill with customers, FTC guidance also requires clear disclosure of material connections.
Creator partnerships need to be:
- Made simple and clear
- In the same language as the endorsement itself
- Placed where it’s hard to miss (for example, early in an Instagram caption, before the “...more” button)
Improve the customer experience
Brand partnerships let you sell products customers want without figuring out the logistics of manufacturing those items yourself.
Take Drake Related, the hub for projects by Canadian rapper Drake. They redesigned their website to become an artistic recreation of Drake’s Toronto home. Each room on the website has shoppable products from other brands sourced through Shopify Collective.
These brand collaborations let the team add new product categories fans actually wanted. Any orders placed through the Drake Related site are instantly routed to the brand partner for fulfillment.
Get valuable product feedback
Partnering with influencers, whether a celebrity influencer or micro influencer, offers an opportunity to receive authentic, constructive feedback about your product or marketing messages from the influencer and their community.
Ramen brand immi, for example, sent out free samples to social media creators in exchange for feedback. Anyone who showed interest was invited to join the brand’s ambassador program and earn commission when they sold an immi product. Collectively, these partnerships drove $200,000 in sales.
Types of ecommerce partnerships
There are multiple types of ecommerce partnerships to consider:
Creator and influencer partnerships
Creator and influencer partnerships happen when you team up with an individual with a large following on social media platforms. The influencer agrees to promote a product in exchange for a flat rate or commission.
Luggage brand Solgaard, for example, uses Shopify Collabs to find social media influencers to promote their eco-friendly brand values to a wider audience. This translated into sales: Solgaard recorded 287% month-over-month revenue growth and $50,000 in sales attributed to creator partnerships.
“Our team is constantly seeking new ways to advance our mission of preventing as much ocean plastic as possible,” says founder and CEO Adrian Solgaard. “Fostering a community of remarkable individuals on the Shopify Collabs app has made our efforts easier and more effective, which helps us to drive maximum impact.”
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate partnerships give creators commission when they sell your products. This can range from 5% to 15% for physical goods and higher for digital products and courses, with no up-front cost. The brand pays when the affiliate promotes your product and makes a sale via their unique affiliate link.
Moonboon recruits influencers and gives each partner their own discount code. Sales attributed to those affiliates have exceeded $1 million, with the program recording a 6.5-times return on revenue. One creator has driven over $110,000 in sales despite having less than 25,000 social media followers.
Complementary brand partnerships
Two brands can work together on co-branded products, a collaborative marketing campaign, or by selling their products into a joint bundle.
Shopify Collective opens the door to these ecommerce partnerships without the hassle of manufacturing or fulfillment. You can find products sold by other Shopify brands, then offer them on your website. Orders are routed to the partner to fulfill and ship directly to your customers. The partner can reciprocate by showing your products on their site.
“When it comes to working with new suppliers there's a certain amount of risk that's associated with that,” says Raina Khumush, senior director of marketing and ecommerce at buybuy BABY. “You don't know what products will resonate. With Shopify Collective, a lot of that is taken off our plate.”
Retail and pop-up partnerships
Studies estimate it costs almost $40,000 to open a retail store. Partnerships let you tap into in-person sales if you don’t have that much money to spend, or would rather test the waters before committing to a fixed location.
Lodge, for example, sells their cast iron pans at Target, where Papatui also sells their men’s skincare products.
Brand licensing
Brand licensing is a type of collaboration in which one brand lends another brand rights to use their intellectual property.
Take Grind, who tapped into the Pokémon craze by licensing popular Pokémon characters. Consumers could shop the collaboration and buy a coffee bean tin featuring their favorite character.
Agency and technology partnerships
Not all ecommerce partnerships are customer-facing. You can partner with apps (like those in the Shopify App Store) or agencies (through Shopify Partner Program) to access expertise you don’t have in-house.
Examples include:
- Ecommerce platforms
- App integrations
- Fulfillment partners
- Creative or technology agencies
Polysleep, for example, worked with a tech partner when building out their website.
“I'm not a web developer,” says CEO Jeremiah Curvers in a Shopify Masters interview. “So, for less than $2,000 to $3,000, we had a website up and running in a couple of weeks.
“It was far from being perfect, but it was doing the job. And we went with Shopify, we added a couple of apps to that, and we were live.”
How to build successful ecommerce partnerships
Here’s how to launch an ecommerce partnership, from determining the right partners and monitoring success:
1. Assess your goals and budget
Be clear-eyed about what your company needs and what it can afford to spend on marketing and relationship-building.
Eightx’s 2026 research analyzed 12 public direct-to-consumer (DTC) and consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands. It found the average business spends 13.31% of its annual company revenue on marketing. You might go above or below this figure depending on any new product launches or brand-building initiatives you want to do through ecommerce partnerships.
Becca makes this planning part of Fishwife’s yearly review.
“At the end of the prior year, we map out the following year’s marketing calendar, including key themes we want to emphasize quarterly and monthly.”
2. Research potential partners
Find ecommerce partners with an audience of people likely to be interested in your product. If that’s an influencer partnership, for example, ask for their Instagram analytics. Does the gender, location, and age of their audience match your buyer personas?
Go one step further by vetting partners against brand and cultural fit. Solgaard, for example, worked with creators who shared their environmental mission.
Partnership opportunities can arise from existing connections, whether that’s an influencer already posting authentic brand promotions or a similar local store that shares similar values.
“For our partnerships with other brands, it's happened largely very organically," says Jing Gao, founder and CEO of Fly By Jing, in a Shopify Masters interview.
"We tend to gravitate and vice versa to companies that have similar ethos as us and have similar customer bases as us and also can work on something just fun with us. So I think that's kind of our approach: Does this make sense? Are we aligned in terms of our communities? And can we just have some fun with it?"
3. Choose the right partnership model
What channels does your ideal customer base spend time on? How do they engage with brands there? Reverse engineer your ecommerce partnership strategy with a model that meets both.
Examples include:
- Influencers: If you run a small ecommerce business or have a limited marketing budget and your product appeals to everyday consumers, working with influencers could be a great way to build brand visibility on a shoestring. Nano influencers with under 10,000 followers charge as little as $10 to $100 per sponsored post on Instagram.
- Complementary brands: By partnering with a brand that offers complementary products, you could reach each other’s audience and split marketing costs for the collaborative efforts.
- Physical stores: If you want to explore physical retail without the commitment of a fixed location, consider a pop-up shop inside another brand’s store.
Be realistic with how many collaborations you can launch before formalizing agreements.
“We only have capacity for so much,” says Kristen Pumphrey, founder of P.F. Candle Co., who has launched collaborations with Peanuts and Toy Machine. “We really only take on two collaborative projects a year, so we have to be quite strategic and thoughtful about the partners we’re choosing.
“Collaboratively, we try to do one smaller project that’s very brand-building and feels like a friend-of-the-brand type of thing, and one bigger one that’s really good for reach.”
4. Connect with a specific value proposition
Reach out to ecommerce partners with a clear unique value proposition that demonstrates why partnering with you is beneficial for both parties involved.
Here are some questions to address in your initial outreach to potential partners:
- Why are you interested in partnering with this brand or company?
- What does the business you’re contacting stand to gain by working with you?
- How could the partnership be mutually beneficial? What strengths do the two brands bring to the table? How are these complementary or additive?
Taylor Frankel took this approach when pitching a brand partnership for Nudestix. She landed three-month exclusivity to stock their products in a small boutique apothecary by leaning into their brand’s story.
“Due to our story, because we barely had any product at the time, they said, ‘We are willing to take a chance on you. We love your story. We love your multigenerational founder story. We love that you're speaking to beauty in a modern way that speaks to this modern woman,’” Taylor says in a Shopify Masters interview.
“In exchange for a three-month exclusivity with them, they provided us with all of their internal press resources,” Taylor says. “That really allowed us to share our story in a mass way to the media and bloggers at the time.”
5. Establish an agreement
Once you’ve found a prospective partner, formalize the partnership with a written agreement that lays out each party’s responsibilities, how much each will spend or receive, and timelines for deliverables.
For example, an influencer partnership agreement might include:
- Deliverables
- Compensation
- FTC disclosure requirements
- Ownership or usage rights for content
- Appropriate communication channels
“You’ve got to get the contract in, and you’ve got to work out the terms,” says Kristen. “There is no way around the tedium of going through a contract line by line, and if it’s a big contract, you have to send it out to an attorney to make sure everything’s good.”
6. Track KPIs and adapt
Track progress toward key performance indicators (KPIs) by monitoring referral traffic, conversion rate, revenue, and customer acquisition cost (CAC) for new shoppers acquired through partnerships.
You can find these metrics through:
- Sales analysis of products or bundles co-created with your partner
- Discount code tracking for each partner (e.g., an influencer’s name as the code)
- UTM-tagged links in marketing campaigns or influencer posts
“Once you have a partnership, it's important to just keep that partnership,” says Jacob Winter, founder of Mush Studios, in a Shopify Masters interview.
“Just keep that partnership as long as you can show your excitement and show your investment with the product. They're typically a lot of work because you have to do something that's very exclusive, but that's the most exciting part."
Ways to activate an ecommerce partnership
“Every partnership is unique,” says Max Kislevitz, cofounder of fitness brand Bala, in a Shopify Masters interview. “Every brand has its idiosyncrasies. It’s not just about saying, oh, let's put our logos on one another's product and have it be sort of a merchandising exercise on site.
“Instead, it’s like ‘Hey, we have mutual interest in one another. How could we bring this to life in the most interesting and kind of thoughtful way?’”
Here are four ways to do that and activate new ecommerce partnerships:
Run a co-branded bundle
Let customers support your brand and a partner by launching a co-branded product bundle. This lets you and another brand tap into each other’s audiences without investing in manufacturing a new product from scratch.
Matcha brand Perfect Ted, for example, launched a collaboration with coffee shop chain Joe & The Juice. The bundle included a matcha pouch and to-go cup to use at Joe & The Juice stores. It also included merchandise, like t-shirts and tote bags, featuring both brand’s logos.
Launch a joint giveaway or campaign
Giveaways that offer free products give you an opportunity to collect customer data. Post-partnership, you can reach out to entrants directly without relying on social media reach.
Drake Related demonstrated how to do this with technology partners. In a bid to gamify the experience for his tour, Drake partnered with Shop app to project shoppable QR codes onto the side of each arena.
Attendees who scanned the code could download the Shop app, access a Drake-branded product page, enter their shipping details, and receive a free gift. Those gifts ranged from branded Drake merchandise to exclusive NOCTA x Nike sneakers.
Create an affiliate or creator offer
Give each influencer a unique discount code alongside their affiliate link as an extra incentive for their followers to buy.
Discount codes also ease the problem of influencer attribution. Some 79% of influencer marketers struggle to measure their return on investment (ROI). But when customers use the name of the influencer as their discount code, you can ask Sidekick, “What was the total value of orders that used this discount code last month?” to get a direct answer from your own Shopify data.
Use retail placements or shop-in-shops to drive online growth
If you’re online-only, partnering with other brands that have a brick-and-mortar location lets you sell in-person without the logistics of operating your own store.
Take period underwear brand Thinx. Their VP of partnerships Lyndsey Arnold says the brand “sought out new partnerships with stores like Urban Outfitters and Free People, knowing that they would be looking to increase their comfort offerings.”
If you go the shop-in-shop route, Shopify POS lets you collect customer emails at checkout. This lets you retarget any new customers and convince them to buy online after the event ends.
Beauty brand Sculpted By Aimee uses this feature. They recorded a 275% increase in email capture and found omnichannel shoppers who shop both in-store and online spend up to four times more than those who stick to online-only.
Ecommerce partnerships FAQ
What types of ecommerce partnerships work best for small brands?
No one form of partnership is the best option for every brand. The best fit for your brand depends on your target audience, budget, and business model. Common examples include affiliate relationships, influencer marketing, brand collaborations, and technology partnerships.
How do you structure an ecommerce partnership agreement?
There are multiple ways to structure an ecommerce partnership agreement. You could combine products from either brand into a bundle, launch a joint giveaway, work with affiliates and influencers, or stock your products in another brand’s retail store.
What metrics should you track in an ecommerce partnership?
Map partnership KPIs to the goal of the collaboration. For example, metrics to track an affiliate partnership might include affiliate conversion rate, discount code usage, affiliate earnings per click, and CAC from affiliate traffic.
What Shopify tools help manage creator and partner programs?
Shopify has two programs that support ecommerce partnerships:
- Shopify Collabs handles creator and affiliate collaboration workflows, including creator recruitment, offers, gifts, referral links, discount codes, and automatic payouts.
- The Shopify Partner Program connects ecommerce brands with agencies, developers, and service/technology partners.
