Because YouTube is focused on video content, shoppable videos and livestreams function more similarly to TikTok than Meta, with an easy shopping button displayed on content and in a product “shelf” below the content.
In order to set up YouTube Shopping, channels must have a minimum of 1,000 subscribers with 4,000 valid public watch hours in the last 12 months, or 1,000 subscribers with 10 million valid public Shorts views in the last 90 days. YouTube Shopping also requires connection with an existing ecommerce platform, like Shopify, and doesn’t offer their own native solution, which may be limiting to both brands and creators.
Until YouTube’s commerce options expand, the platform is best suited for creators or brands with a healthy, engaged subscriber base and frequently produced, timely content that stands out.
Social search and alternative commerce platforms
Regardless of platform, shoppers are increasingly turning to social instead of Google to search for and research products before making a purchase. The shift in behavior is driven by younger consumers on TikTok, and this preference for visual, video-led search results has pushed Meta and YouTube to offer paid social search ads as a complement to paid social campaigns.
For brands building Meta or YouTube shopping experiences, adding social search to the media mix and targeting younger audiences can help boost the success of social shopping. And partnering with creators to amplify these efforts is likely to pay off—creator content drove more social purchases than any other content type, including brand-produced content, according to a March 2024 survey by eMarketer.
Beyond Meta and YouTube, there remains a place for Pinterest, given its focus on visual content and shoppable pins that can fuel product discovery. Creators have also been supplementing their visual content from TikTok and Instagram with longer-form content through the subscription-based platform Substack, which not only offers monetization for creators through its subscription model, but also can easily incorporate affiliate links for subscribers to shop.
On the retailer end of the spectrum, Amazon Inspire is an app that connects brand and creator content directly to Amazon’s marketplace with a focus on user-generated content. Given that many creators promote their Amazon storefronts through Amazon’s affiliate program, Inspire takes this a step further with video content.
Although these platforms aren’t exact replacements of TikTok, they still give creators another option or two worth keeping an eye on.
