YouTube Plans to Bring Live-Stream Shopping to Everyone

Social media platforms have made live-stream shopping a main priority, with popular social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest all hosting their own shopping live-streams with high-profile entrepreneurs in an effort to maximise their respective commerce potential.

YouTube is also attempting to break into the market, with a series of upcoming retail live streams for the holidays that will allow viewers to connect with social influencers in real-time, while also facilitating direct-purchase in-app.  To that end, YouTube intends to allow anyone with a mobile device and a product to effortlessly conduct a live shopping stream.

Wendy Yang and Lax Poojary, product developers working on YouTube Shopping, talked about how they hope to advance the platform’s live-stream commerce efforts.

The primary goal of live-stream purchasing is to serve as an extension of existing user habits, with influencers already endorsing products and creators within their uploads, typically in exchange for endorsement deals and other forms of compensation. Due to the fact that this is already standard practice, live-stream commerce merely builds on this foundation.

Yang points out:

“The exciting thing about live shopping, and shopping generally, is that we’re already seeing it happen on YouTube – with creators revealing a product line, dropping new merch, or discussing their latest shopping haul. People want to shop on YouTube and, according to a study we ran in partnership with Publicis and TalkShoppe, 89% of viewers agree that YouTube creators give recommendations they can trust.”

She added that when it comes to shopping or browsing on YouTube, 87 per cent of individuals think they get the best quality information about the things they are looking at.

Many viewers, especially younger ones, now trust YouTubers as much as they trust traditional media stars. Consequently, the link between in-stream recommendations and purchases makes sense, with live streaming providing a more instantaneous correlation between the two.

As far as I’m concerned, there’s more to the storey. During the past year, the growth of eCommerce has opened up new possibilities, which will allow for much more digital surfing the web and purchasing during the holiday season and beyond, among other things. And it is in this area that YouTube sees a continuing and expanding opportunity.

In order to bring you closer to your favourite creators, YouTube will make this live-streams interactive between the creators and their audience. Yang confirms that creators can interact with and solicit feedback from their audience by offering them live product drops, exclusive deals, and even polling followers throughout their shopping live streams.

You can see from the samples above that YouTube is working on adding additional functionality and interactive capabilities to the live-stream purchase experience, with the goal of eventually making it possible for all users to create their own shopping channels.

Additionally, more entrepreneurs will have the chance to monetise their products through streams, with the quick and interactive capacity of live broadcasts contributing to an increase in the FOMO factor as well as building a sense of community around particular brands and creators.

With its debut slate of live-stream shopping events poised to provide additional information into what consumers want to see in these streams and which features creators find most useful, YouTube will be hoping to play an important role in this.

It has the potential to be a huge development that opens the door to significant opportunities in the future.

You’ll be able to watch upcoming live shopping events hosted by YouTube.