Shopify & YouTube Join Forces to Make Online Shopping Easier
Have you ever browsed YouTube, seen something very cool that you’d like to buy and wondered how you can get hold of it?
That problem can be solved with the recent Shopify and YouTube announcement. Effectively, they’ve joined forces so that viewers can access your Shopify shop from inside their YouTube channel.
Under the new integration/partnership, live streams get product pins, videos get a “product shelf” and the channel page gets a Store tab. Products link directly to the store, making it easy for people to shop in your store without leaving the videos they’re watching.
To put it another way, YouTube becomes “shoppable”.
Fewer clicks for shoppers to get the products that they want has got to be good for conversions and sales for millions of Shopify merchants around the world.
Let’s take a closer look at the Shopify and YouTube integration.
A powerful new way to connect and engage with your audience
YouTube Shopping on Shopify represents another powerful way for Shopify brands to connect with their audiences around the world.
YouTube is one of the world’s biggest entertainment platforms and its stats are eye-popping: 2.6 billion users worldwide, over 122 million daily active users and one billion hours of video watched every single day.
Every day, huge numbers of people come to YouTube for product information, product recommendations, advice on how to use products, and so on. But the shopping experience usually stops there — until they click through to a store that sells the desired product. Not exactly a “seamless” shopping experience!
That’s about to change for many Shopify merchants and YouTube entrepreneurs.
Audiences spend many hours daily on YouTube. It’s their primary social media platform. The opportunity of tapping into this highly engaged market with a direct shopping experience linked to your store needs little introduction.
Reaching out and connecting your Shopify store with the target audience beyond the normal in-store experience can provide a huge boost to your sales. The Shopify and YouTube connection offers merchants and content creators a way to meaningfully engage with customers in their chosen environment while they do what they love — watch a video.
Just as Shopify merchants can expand their reach by developing engaging video content, content creators have a more efficient way to sell products to their audience through their Shopify store. Merchants and creators are brought closer together, blurring the lines between the two more than ever.
How does YouTube Shopping on Shopify help you sell?
With YouTube Shopping on Shopify, merchants can focus on developing engaging YouTube content that doesn’t just educate and market to your target audience but links directly to a shopping experience — as if shoppers were in your store.
Here are a few useful things that the new partnership enables for Shopify merchants:
- Integrate your online stores with your YouTube channels
- Display products beneath videos with the product shelf
- Display products during a live stream
- Pin products for easy access during a live stream
So, the integration is designed for merchants who want to reach out and engage with their customers through video and live streams:
- During live streams, merchants can tag and pin products at key points with picture-in-picture playback allowing shoppers to watch the stream while they check out.
- In on-demand videos, merchants can show a curated list of products in a product shelf below the videos.
Additionally, a Store tab remains permanently in view on your YouTube channel page, allowing visitors to shop your Shopify store’s products even without watching a video or live stream.
For some eligible Shopify merchants based in the U.S., onsite checkout on YouTube means shoppers can purchase items without even leaving the video platform. This is enabled through “Buy on Google” from qualified accounts on mobile-first.
Early adopters
YouTube’s drive to be more shoppable has gathered steam in 2022. Many live events, such as the Beauty Festival and Coachella were made completely shoppable for viewers. Increasingly, the ability to tag products in videos has allowed more viewers to shop more easily on the platform.
From a Shopify perspective, one of the first groups of merchants to benefit from the new integration seems to be cosmetics/makeup stores. Many such stores are big on engaging with their target audience through video and live streams, where they can educate and inform potential shoppers.
Christen Dominique, YouTuber and CEO of Dominique Cosmetics, says of the Shopify-YouTube integration:
“Bringing my commerce platform and my most popular viewer engagement platform together will be a game changer for me…. as an entrepreneur finding new ways to build my business, it’s so important that I show up where my customers are shopping, and more and more that’s on YouTube. With the Shopify and YouTube integration, I can share new products from Dominique Cosmetics directly on my videos and lives, and make it easy for viewers to purchase as they watch.”
Cosmetics stores are the tip of the iceberg. Any independent brand in the “creator economy” can thrive with this new integration between Shopify and YouTube.
Cassey Ho, YouTube creator and Shopify merchant, runs Blogilates, a fitness wear store. She says the following about the integration:
“My most viral videos are my design videos. It gives the audience a peek at what’s going on inside my head and the WHY behind each product I design. The incredible thing is that not only do these videos perform well in terms of views and growing my following, but these videos can literally sell out the featured product in a matter of hours!
By allowing the viewer to shop directly from YouTube, it makes shopping seamless and easy. I predict that this will heavily impact my conversion rate which will help more people give my products and my brand a chance to become part of their everyday life!”
How do Shopify merchants get started?
To get set up to sell Shopify products on YouTube, you’ll need to follow four simple steps:
- Install Google channel from the Shopify app store
- In the YouTube Shopping section of the Google channel, connect your YouTube account
- Select the products you want to feature for YouTube Shopping
- Add these products to your videos from Monetization > Shopping
Automatic inventory syncing
Shopify’s system is designed for complete control across the entire ecommerce ecosystem. It is built to sell across multiple channels — a key differentiator for businesses when selecting ecommerce platforms.
With Shopify, all product details are kept up to date across all channels: names, images, pricing, and shipping.
When a product sells out, it will be automatically removed from YouTube and any other channels where it’s usually sold — Shopify’s real-time inventory syncing sees to that.
Tracking and reporting
As with all sales outlets for Shopify, tracking and reporting are important for understanding how performance can be tweaked and improved.
You can track the performance of live and on-demand videos directly from your Shopify admin, with a full view of multichannel sales.
How does Shopify view the YouTube integration?
Kaz Nejatian, VP of Product at Shopify recently expressed the following about the Shopify-YouTube integration:
“Shopify is the commerce infrastructure of the internet, powering millions of independent businesses all over the world. We believe creators are the next generation of merchants, and YouTube has been a long-time leader in powering this new cohort of entrepreneurs. We’re excited to partner with YouTube, and help scale the creator economy into its next phase of growth.”
Ready to start with Shopify on YouTube?
We all know that Shopify helps merchants manage their ecommerce businesses from a single centralized place. And that many entrepreneurs have built businesses from YouTube content.
Bringing the two platforms closer together makes the shopping experience more seamless and will be a game-changing move for many entrepreneurs.
With the Shopify-YouTube integration, merchants can now reach out and engage with more of their video-watching target audience while providing the chance to shop items viewed in videos, live streams and on the Store tab of their channel pages.
It’s available right now for Shopify merchants in the US, Brazil and India, and will be rolled out around the globe soon —there’s no reason to wait!
