In his 2026 letter to creators, CEO Neal Mohan said YouTube is “focused on” making its platform a “premier shopping destination” where viewers can buy products recommended by creators, without ever leaving the YouTube app.
Now, a new partnership might help it achieve that goal.
YouTube and Amazon have officially joined forces, and will let U.S.-based creators who are enrolled in both the YouTube Partner Program and the Amazon Influencer Program (or Amazon Associate Program) sell Amazon products directly within their long- and short-form videos.
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Anytime their viewers purchase products tagged in their videos, creators will get their standard Amazon commission cut (a number that reportedly averages between 2% and 4% of the sale price). This cut will be paid out by YouTube, bundled in with the creator’s usual AdSense check. If a viewer later returns a product, the creator’s previously earned commission cut will be deducted from the creator’s next payout.
There are some limitations here. Creators can’t link any product they want. Instead, as Creator Liaison Rene Ritchie explained, Amazon “provides YouTube with a curated catalog of highly requested and trending products” for creators to link in their videos.
If a creator wants a product that’s not listed, they can reach out to YouTube Support and request that it be added, but addition isn’t guaranteed. Amazon and YouTube might also help facilitate international sales of products by directing viewers outside the U.S. to merchants that ship to their locations; if a viewer finalizes their purchase with a merchant off Amazon’s platform, the creator won’t get a cut.
We get why Amazon and YouTube are restricting the products and suppliers creators can link. The goal here is obviously for YouTube (and Amazon) to compete with the behemoth that is TikTok Shop–and TikTok Shop has had numerous issues with shady sellers and questionable products. By curating a strict catalog, Amazon and YouTube are mitigating this problem from the jump.
That being said, if the catalog is limited (we don’t know yet how big it is), creators may run into the dropshipper conundrum, where everyone is trying to sell the same pool of currently viral items.
However it shakes out, though, this partnership is a significant step for YouTube. Google’s platform is leaning hard into ecommerce: connected TV shopping was a major topic at its most recent NewFronts, it’s already established partnerships with online marketplaces and social shopping hubs like TalkShopLive and Rakuten Ichiba, and in March, it expanded access to the YouTube Shopping affiliate program, so anyone in the YPP with 500+ subscribers could start selling to their viewers.
Is this push paying off? YouTube says there are now more than 1 million creators signed up for Shopping, and that the gross merchandise value of products sold through Shopping grew 13x from Q1 2024 to Q1 2026.
Perhaps the most noteworthy thing here is that YouTube is achieving all this without actually touching products itself. Unlike TikTok Shop, which has an Amazon-esque fulfillment program that makes it responsible for shipping some items, YouTube is hands-off, relying entirely on outside brands, vendors, and marketplaces to handle everything after a purchase is made.
That approach gives YouTube a low-lift, low-investment way to compete in our ever more capitalized creator space.
