What Is YouTube Shopping? Beginner’s Guide To Selling

You may know YouTube as the go-to destination for silly cat videos, elaborate beauty tutorials, and music video drops, but it’s also a bonafide ecommerce powerhouse.

YouTube is now the second largest social media platform in the world, drawing billions of monthly active users for everything from watching cooking tutorials to buying hair extensions. According to Bridget Dolan, YouTube’s global managing director of shopping, userswatched 30 billion hours of shopping-related videos in 2023 alone—the equivalent of 3.4 million years. 

As more users flock to YouTube and make purchases, the platform is an invaluable tool for retailers to drive sales. Wondering how you can tap into this captive audience and start making sales straight from the YouTube app? It’s time to learn more about YouTube Shopping. 

What is YouTube Shopping?

YouTube Shopping is an ecommerce program that allows business owners and creators to promote products directly within YouTube content, including videos, video descriptions, shorts, ads, and livestreams. By teaming with ecommerce partners like Shopify, the program helps brands seamlessly connect their stores to their YouTube channels and drive conversions. 

Eligibility criteria

While the program is inclusive and open to all business owners, you need to be a member of the YouTube Partner Program, which has the following eligibility criteria. Your YouTube channel must:

• Have a minimum of 1,000 subscribers
• Be approved for monetization
• Be located in a country where the YouTube Partner Program is available
• Not be marked as Made for Kids or have a significant number of videos marked as Made for Kids.
• Not have a significant number of videos that violate monetization policies
• Not have any strikes for violating YouTube’s Hate Speech Community Guidelines.
• Must be marked as an Official Artist Channel, if it is a music channel

Why set up YouTube Shopping?

YouTube Shopping is a feature designed to help you expose your products to new audiences. Well before the official launch of YouTube Shopping in 2018, the platform was already helping business owners make gains.

Take Mimi Ikonn, for example. When the YouTuber and Luxy Hair co-founder was getting her hair extension company off the ground in 2010, she knew the social media platform would be key. Through her YouTube videos, she grew the brand’s channel to more than 3three million subscribers, helping Luxy Hair flourish into a multimillion-dollar company. 

“As long as it’s a topic that you’re really interested in and you can simplify it for people, people will watch and they will engage with that content,” she says on the Shopify Masters podcast about the value ecommerce business owners can bring to YouTube. 

“Whenever I made the videos, it was very much an organic sell. Whenever I told people to buy the products, it was very much just educational.”

Today, social media and live commerce is only growing in popularity, making YouTube and YouTube Shopping increasingly vital to business owners. Statista estimates that US livestream ecommerce sales reached $50 billion in 2023.

With demand on the rise, YouTube Shopping has upped the ante, adding additional features over the years and providing even more resources to support brands and creators. 

Ways to use YouTube Shopping features

• Connect your store directly to YouTube
• Tag products
• Select highlighted products at the end of videos
• Access YouTube Shopping analytics
• Create Shopping Collections
• Access the Affiliate Hub

YouTube Shopping includes a variety of features that include the ability to: 

Connect your store directly to YouTube

Sell products directly to users engaging with content across your channels. Integrating your online store with YouTube allows you to seamlessly showcase your products in videos, livestreams, and Shorts.

Tag products

Users can click on tagged products in a video or view a product shelf to learn more about items and purchase them directly. This interactive feature provides a convenient way for viewers to explore products featured in the content and make a purchase without leaving the platform.

Select highlighted products at the end of videos

With YouTube Shopping, you can strategically choose which goods are promoted to users at the end of a piece of content. This allows you to focus on products that are most relevant to the video’s theme or that you want to prioritize for sales.

Access YouTube Shopping analytics

You can view reports and data to see how content is performing and how well it’s driving conversions. By analyzing these insights, you can gain valuable information about your audience’s preferences, optimize your marketing strategies, and make data-driven decisions to improve sales. 

Create Shopping Collections

A new feature announced in April 2024, Shopping Collections allows creators to curate products around themes or topics so users can view and shop directly. This feature provides a more immersive shopping experience for viewers and helps creators showcase their product knowledge and taste.

Access the Affiliate Hub

Also launched in April 2024, the Affiliate Hub helps connect creators with brands to forge affiliate marketing sales partnerships on YouTube Shopping. Creators can also use the hub to learn more about commission rates, promo codes, and how to get samples from brands. 

How to set up YouTube Shopping with Shopify

1. Connect your Shopify store to YouTube
2. Connect your Google account
3. Confirm eligibility
4. Agree to terms and complete setup
5. Tag products

Once you’ve met the eligibility criteria, getting started onYouTube Shopping with Shopify is pretty straightforward. Here’s what to do:

1. Connect your Shopify store to YouTube

Sign in to YouTube Studio and click Monetization > Shopping. In the “Add products from your store” section, click on “Connectstore.” Select “Shopify,” followed by “Continued.” This will generate a new page, after which, you can select “Go to Shopify.”

2. Connect your Google account 

From your Shopify admin, click Settings > Apps and sales channels, and then select Google. Select “Open saleschannel.” Go to your Google account, log in, verify your information, and check that you’ve connected to the correct Google account.

3. Confirm eligibility

After selecting “Get Started” in the YouTube Shopping section, you will need to confirm you meet the eligibility criteria listed above to use YouTube Shopping. 

4. Agree to terms and complete setup

Carefully review the terms and conditions to ensure you understand the platform’s policies and guidelines. Once you’ve agreed to the terms, simply hit “Complete setup” to finalize the process.

5. Tag products

After uploading a video, go to Video Elements, select “Tag Products,” and then “Add.” Once you’ve typed in the name of the product, you can drag it to an item or area within the video. Tagged products are visible in the “View Products” tab in the corner of your video content.

You can also add product tags to existing or older content by clicking on the desired video under “Content,” tapping “Products,” and dragging them to the intended location. You can tag up to 30 items within a video at a time, according to the tagging guidelines.