User blog comment:MisterWoodhouse/Introducing Affiliate Marketing/@comment-5558012-20200910194854/@comment-20644-20200910201120

We think that the navigational links are going to be important for SEO purposes, so Google can find and hopefully surface the store in search results using Fandom's SEO authority. So once we knew we wanted to have some sort of linking structure like that, we considered what options we had available. Ultimately, for a variety of reasons, putting it somewhere into the local navigation was the only thing that seemed to make sense.

Originally, we wanted to have "Shop" as its own nav item like Explore, Discuss, and the custom options communities add. But it turned out that there wasn't enough room to add Shop as its own nav item unless we took away Explore, Discuss, or some of the space for the community-created options. None of those options were viable, especially taking away some of the community-controlled space, so putting it into Explore became the natural solution. It also will hopefully work for SEO while being as minimally intrusive as possible.

In the future, especially as we get into UCP's Phase 2 redesign, we'll be able to look at where we place links (and if they worked as intended for SEO) so placement could theoretically change in the future. No guarantee, of course, but ultimately we're looking for whatever seems to make the most sense.