YouTube is plugging Amazon straight into its shopping tools so creators can point viewers to Amazon listings without clunky workarounds. "It's the biggest online retailer in the world coming together with the most-used application on the internet," said Travis Katz, who runs YouTube Shopping. He portrayed e-commerce as Alphabet's next big swing, drawing a parallel to the company's long-term bets on podcasting and on TV-style viewing in the home, a realm where YouTube is now the go-to destination.
"Video has completely changed the way people shop," Katz said, adding that fans often put more faith in creators than in traditional salespeople. "In the old days, we used to browse store windows. Today, people browse videos."
Creators can mark items from thousands of merchants across the spectrum, including small labels, direct-to-consumer shops, and big names like Walmart, Sephora and Home Depot. Google's Gemini makes tagging simpler. Viewers tap for details and to purchase, and creators earn a cut on every sale driven by those tags. Katz said on-video shopping tags spark roughly twice the engagement of an affiliate link tucked into a video description. Until now, though, creators didn't have an easy way to include Amazon items with those tags.
Shopping on YouTube started about four years ago, initially leaning on links in descriptions or comments to sell creator merchandise. The affiliate program launched in the US in 2024, then reached India and Southeast Asia, and more recently rolled out in the United Kingdom, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. Katz said YouTube Shopping's global GMV rose 13 times between Q1 2024 and Q1 2026. More than one million of the roughly three million monetizing creators now participate. Viewers are watching 110 million hours of shopping-focused videos every day, spanning reviews, get-ready-with-me clips, outfit hauls and makeup tutorials.
YouTube Shopping hasn't matched TikTok Shop's momentum yet. TikTok struck its own Amazon arrangement two years ago, letting people buy Amazon products via ads without leaving the TikTok app. Katz argued YouTube is "pretty uniquely positioned" to win in commerce: "We're the second-largest search engine in the world, so people are using YouTube for research in a way that they don't use other platforms, and being part of the Google universe, we can leverage things like Gemini to build interesting experiences."
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For creators, this opens a fresh lane to monetize the products their audiences already search for. For shoppers, it shortens the path from a trusted review to a checkout page. And for anyone tracking the collision of content and commerce, a faster-growing YouTube Shopping plus an Amazon tie-up signals more sales and commissions flowing through videos rather than banner ads or old-school links.