Shopify Partners With YouTube to Tap Into Growing Pool of Content Creators

Shopify Inc on Tuesday announced a partnership with Alphabet Inc's YouTube to allow merchants to sell through the video platform, as the Canadian company looks to tap into the growing number of content creators launching their own e-commerce stores. The partnership, which builds on an existing one with Google, will allow merchants to integrate their online stores with YouTube, which reaches over two billion monthly users. Shopify, which makes tools for merchants to set up their online stores, in June launched new features to help its clients sell to other businesses and on Twitter in a bid to counter a post-pandemic slowdown in online shopping.

The company lost its prime spot as Canada's most valuable company and its shares have lost more than three quarters of their value so far this year as consumers return to stores.

Shopify's director of product, marketplaces and creators, Amir Kabbara, said the partnership with YouTube would help boost conversion rate and in turn the gross merchandise volume, a key success metric, for the company.

Merchants can tag and pin products during live streams, show a curated list of products in a product shelf below on-demand videos and add a store tab under their YouTube channel to feature their products.

Shopify, which has also partnered with TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms, said it saw orders placed through such partner integrations quadruple in the first quarter of the year.

Lasy month, Shopify unveiled a range of new features, which includes the ability for small businesses to launch NFT-gated storefronts as a way of making their stores more exclusive. The company that allows businesses to create custom e-commerce storefronts has released a framework, which enables merchants to launch "tokengated stores" to which fans have exclusive access to, should they possess tokens from the particular brand. The introduction of NFT-gating as a feature for businesses is a part of Shopify's twice-yearly global product release, Editions.

According to Shopify the release features more than a 100 platform updates, and the company is also offering the possibility of minting and selling NFTs straight from the blockchain and onto the online store. A dozen NFT minting apps are suggested to smoothly complete the operation, with Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, and Flow indicated as the supported blockchains.