YouTube is already capturing billions of hours of world attention. Now the video giant also wants to collect a larger portion of online consumer purchases.
The platform is looking at new tools in YouTube Studio’s shopping tab, with the goal of lubricating the wheels of e-commerce, so that content creators can more easily manage how their products are tagged and visible across their channel. In addition, all content creators eligible for the YouTube Merchandise Program can now access live shopping features, such as the ability to tag products in a live stream directly from the live control room dashboard.
YouTube has also partnered with Shopify, an e-commerce service provider, to allow creators and merchants to showcase their products across their YouTube channels and content. Creators can now link their Shopify store to their YouTube channel in just a few steps, according to David Katz, YouTube’s vice president of shopping products.
Additionally, starting next week, YouTube will introduce a new shopping destination in Explore tab It will feature “relevant” shoppable content from creator channels in three countries: the US, Brazil, and India. This will be rolled out to additional countries later this year.
Katz wrote in a blog post announcing that creators “spend a lot of time building a business and developing their products, so we want to make it easy for them to connect, manage their YouTube stores, and bring their products directly to their audience,” the Shopify charter and new shopping features for creators.
By connecting Shopify stores to their YouTube channel, content creators will be able to take advantage of Shopify’s real-time inventory syncing ability – designed to eliminate the chance of a product being out of stock. US-based creators can enable on-site payment through Shopify so viewers can complete purchases without leaving YouTube. Shopify pricing plans start at $29 per month for the basic ecommerce package. The company also charges an online credit card processing fee, which starts at 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction.
“We believe creators are the next generation of merchants, and YouTube has long been a leader in supporting this new group of entrepreneurs,” said Kaz Ngatian, Vice President of Products at Shopify, in a statement.
YouTube expanded access to shopping features to more creators and focused on boosting the ability to sell products live. In 2022, YouTube held live events—including Coachella, YouTube’s second annual beauty festival and from Brazil’s mega Paulistão soccer tournament—”completely shoppable for viewers,” according to Katz.
About 89% of viewers agree that YouTube creators provide recommendations for products and services they trust, according to an August 2021 YouTube study by Publicis Groupe and research firm Talk Shoppe.
In order to be eligible to take advantage of YouTube’s shopping features, a user must meet certain minimum requirements. These include: the channel must be approved for monetization; If the channel is a music channel, it must be an officially approved artist channel; If it is not a music channel, it must have more than 10,000 subscribers; A channel’s audience should not have a ‘too many’ videos that are made for kids.
