Can YouTube Catch TikTok in the Live Shopping Wars?

It’s the hottest social function of the summer. Or, sorry, we meant the hottest social commerce function of the summer.

YouTube has tapped Amazon as its latest and by far greatest YouTube Shopping affiliate partner, allowing creators to tag Amazon products in their videos and livestreams and earn a commission on any resulting sales. It’s an unambiguous attempt to catch up to TikTok, which continues to grow as a massive social commerce and live shopping platform in the US.

The Clock is TikTok-ing

So how stiff is the TikTok competition? Let’s put it this way: America’s supposedly weary consumers seem to forget their woes whenever they scroll into the TikTok Shop. Sales on the platform accounted for 2% of all US e-commerce in July, according to market research firm Consumer Edge. That may not sound like a whole lot, but it’s up from 1.2% a year ago, and trounces both Costco’s and Target’s online sales. It did $4.9 billion in US sales in the first quarter, nearly double the figure from a year earlier, according to e-commerce data firm Charm.io. By all accounts, that’s far larger than YouTube Shopping, though parent company Alphabet reveals scant data about the platform.

YouTube Shopping may yet have some key advantages, however. At least, that’s what YouTube Shopping chief Travis Katz told Bloomberg last week:

• Viewers already watch 110 million hours of product-related videos on YouTube every day, Katz said, including gadget reviews, outfit showcases, and makeup tutorials. Roughly 3 million YouTube creators are eligible to join the platform, Katz says, though only about a million have so far.
• Meanwhile, YouTube Shopping’s gross merchandise volume is up 13x from the first quarter of 2024 to the first quarter of 2026, Katz said. YouTube also remains the world’s second-most used search engine behind its older cousin Google.

Let’s Stay Together: Katz told Bloomberg that YouTube Shopping and e-commerce will be the next big swing for the entire Alphabet organization. Thanks to a recent legal development, the ability to take big swings is more of a luxury than a necessity. Last week, a federal judge ruled that Google would not have to dismantle its online advertising business, suggesting behavioral remedies instead for the unit that was deemed an illegal monopoly last year.