YouTube takes on TikTok Shop with expanded Shopify partnership | TechCrunch

As TikTok Shop gains traction, YouTube is expanding its partnership with Shopify to onboard more brands for its YouTube Shopping affiliate program, the company announced on Tuesday. The expanded partnership means creators will get access to thousands of new brands to tag in their shopping videos, marking a significant increase from the few hundred brands they currently have access to.

As part of the expansion, all eligible Shopify Plus and Advanced merchants in the U.S. can now sign up for the Shopping affiliate program.

The YouTube Shopping affiliate program gives creators a way to earn money through their videos while helping their audience find new products. For brands, it’s another way to reach customers and increase sales.

The expanded partnership will allow YouTube to be better poised to take on TikTok, which is reportedly aiming to grow its TikTok Shop U.S. business tenfold to $17.5 billion this year. Although TikTok is newer to the U.S. e-commerce space when compared to YouTube, the company has been onboarding merchants at a relatively fast pace, as TikTok reported in April that it had 500,000 merchants in the U.S. on TikTok Shop by the end of 2023.

YouTube also announced that it’s launching a new Chrome extension that will allow creators in the U.S. who are part of the affiliate program to save products while browsing a brand or retailer’s site in order to quickly find them when they’re ready to tag them in a video.

The expansion of the affiliate program comes as YouTube has ramped up its e-commerce efforts over the past few years as a way to bring in more revenue amid a slowdown in digital advertising. Its efforts seem to be working, as YouTube previously announced that people watched more than 30 billion hours of shopping-related videos on YouTube in 2023, and that that platform saw a 25% increase in watch time for videos that help people shop.

Of course, the program is also beneficial for creators who want to earn more money through the platform, which is why YouTube recently launched new Shopping features to help creators better market products and grow their earnings.