Google plans to make YouTube an integrated e-commerce destination

Google is planning on turning YouTube into an e-commerce platform. Google wants consumers to purchase products straight through YouTube’s website. So, this means products seen in tutorials, reviews, and unboxing videos could all potentially be available to purchase directly from their site.

Bloomberg reports that steps are already underway to start turning the large video website into a one-stop shopping site. Recently, YouTube started asking creators to use YouTube software to tag and track products featured in their videos. By gathering this data, Google hopes to create a “vast catalogue of items that viewers can peruse, click on, and buy directly,” said a person familiar with the situation to Bloomberg. A YouTube spokesperson also confirmed to them that the company is only testing this feature on a limited number of video channels.

Already, YouTube is a shopping destination. In a Google article, the company reports that more than half of consumers rely on videos to help them make a purchasing decision. By surveying over 24,000 people, Google found that more than 55 percent of shoppers say they use online video while shopping in-store. One person interviewed said, “I’ll look back at a video to remind myself which product a vlogger spoke about. I need to find the exact moment they said, ‘This is my recommendation.’”

So, YouTube’s video platform does have great purchasing power potential because it gets a consumer to view the video again and make a purchase based on that video. So far, YouTube allows creators to place links to the products they are featuring on their page. This allows consumers to easily access links to the products.

But, that’s where the purchasing influence ends for YouTube. In the end, consumer needs to leave their website to purchase the item.

This isn’t the first time Google has tried taking a stab at integrating e-commerce into YouTube’s website. Last year, the company partnered with Merchbar to allow artists to sell their official merchandise to fans via a bar underneath a video. But, consumers still needed to visit a third-party website to make a purchase. The company is also in beta testing with Shopify. This integration will allow retailers to list and sell items on the video-sharing platform.

Turning YouTube into a shopping website is an “experiment”, according to the YouTube spokesperson Bloomberg spoke to. And, frankly, Google needs this experiment to work because it’s falling behind in the pandemic e-commerce boom. Travel and physical retail sectors have been hit hard by the pandemic. And, both of these bring in large ad revenue for Google. With companies tightening up their marketing budgets, Google ad sales fell 8 percent in Q2.

But, experiment or not, this could eventually happen. Google has already begun tagging content to view data analytics. They know consumers rely on videos to help them decide what they want to buy. They just need to give them the option to purchase through the website. However, the real question is whether this will be beneficial for both YouTube and content creators.