YouTube joins hands with Shopee, jumping into online shopping

YouTube Shopping officially expands its services in Vietnam through the launch of the YouTube Shopping Affiliate program in Vietnam, opening a partnership with Shopee.

With YouTube Shopping, Alphabet and Shopee will compete with TikTok - Photo: N.BINH

Vietnam is one of three countries in Southeast Asia where YouTube Shopping is present, along with Thailand and Indonesia. Globally, Vietnam is the sixth market, alongside the US, South Korea and India.

The event comes as consumers increasingly trust product recommendations from creators. In 2023, global users spent more than 30 billion hours watching shopping-related videos on YouTube, reflecting the platform's huge potential in driving sales.

In particular, while long-standing platforms such as Lazada and Tiki are facing a recession, TikTok has emerged, leading the livestream game with a continuously increasing penetration rate in the e-commerce market. Research also predicts that the trend of shopping via livestream will continue to explode, contributing to the increasingly fierce race for market share between platforms in the future.

With YouTube Shopping, viewers can experience shopping while watching a creator's content. Viewers can check out a list of tagged products and information about each product right in the description and "Products" section of the video.

Simply clicking on a product you like will take viewers directly to the sales page for quick and easy shopping. Creators have the flexibility to tag products, both in their uploaded and new videos, and anchor them in their livestreams.

Like other e-commerce platforms, to quickly expand its presence, YouTube also launched the YouTube Shopping Affiliate program in Vietnam.

Accordingly, creators receive commissions through promoting products in videos, boosting sales. However, the function is deployed with accounts that satisfy a number of conditions such as being part of YouTube's partner program, having more than 10,000 subscribers, the account owner must live in Vietnam, the channel content is not set for children...

In September 2024, YouTube introduced the "Shopping on YouTube" feature in Vietnam, allowing content creators to link products from Shopee directly into their videos.

This is a move to take advantage of YouTube's huge user base to boost online sales. Ms. Mukpim Anantachai - YouTube's director of partnerships in Vietnam and Thailand - expects the new cooperation to promote the development of e-commerce.

According to a report from Google, Temasek and Bain & Company, Vietnam's digital economy is forecast to reach a total gross merchandise value (GMV) of 45 billion USD by 2025, of which e-commerce contributes 24 billion USD, growing 22% annually.

The partnership between YouTube and Shopee also shows the pressure on the shopping and entertainment model that TikTok is implementing. In just a short time, TikTok Shop has taken the second position in the region after Shopee.

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