4 YouTube Shopping updates, including Collections and Affiliate Hub

YouTube introduced four new updates for shopping creators, aimed at enhancing conversions, providing inspiration, and offering more choices. These updates include:

• Shopping Collections.
• The Affiliate Hub.
• Enhanced tagging.
• Fourthwall.

Why we care. If you are a YouTube Shopping creator or a brand that sells products on the platform, these new capabilities and features could be worth reviewing and potentially implementing into your strategy to improve efficiency.

Shopping Collections. Creators participating in YouTube Shopping, including those who have connected their own stories or enrolled in the affiliate program, can now create “collections” to showcase their favorite products. Aditya Dhanrajani, director of product management, YouTube Shopping, said in a statement:

• “We hope Collections helps creators curate their own virtual store on YouTube so people can shop their favorite products and increase earnings.”

How it works. You can feature multiple products from your own line, other brands, or both. They will appear in your product list, store tab and video description – with YouTube promising more areas of discovery coming soon.

Getting started. Creators can currently make Collections using the Studio app on their phone, with desktop support coming soon. No shopping video is needed.

Affiliate Hub. YouTube is introducing Affiliate Hub in Studio for both mobile and desktop, aiming to inspire affiliate creators for their shopping content. This feature offers access to the latest list of Shopping partners, competitive commission rates, promo codes, and the ability to request samples from top brands. The platform aims to simplify the process for Shopping creators, helping them plan their next shoppable video more efficiently.

Tagging. Creators who have their own stores can now tag products and merch across their entire video library at once, based on products detected in links from their videos’ descriptions. YouTube aims to help creators save time by enabling them to efficiently tag and promote more of their own products. Additionally, this functionality can assist creators in earning more revenue from older content that continues to receive high traffic.

Fourthwall. YouTube is adding Fourthwall to its list of integrated platforms to make it easier for creators to create and manage their stories directly in YouTube Studio. When creating or linking your store, you can now choose between Fourthwall and other existing platforms like Spring, Spread Shop and Spotify.

Deep dive. Watch YouTube’s announcement in full for more information.