YouTube is launching its first official live shopping channel

The US-based company is heading to Asia, and more specifically South Korea, in a bid to draw a community of live shopping fans.

YouTube is launching a channel specially dedicated to this form of e-commerce on 30 June, according to Yonhap News Agency.

Some 30 brands are set to be involved at the channel’s launch, and will be able to use the platform to offer their products for sale. The identity of the brands has not yet been revealed.

“YouTube is committed to building an engaging, informative and entertaining shopping experience for all users, including in Korea.

“To do this, we may experiment with various YouTube Shopping features from time to time as we continue to work hard to optimise and deliver the best experience for our users,” a YouTube official was quoted as telling Yonhap News Agency.

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YouTube’s venture into commerce

The streaming video platform has already made moves into the realm of the live shopping phenomenon, specifically by introducing tools for creating references for products featured in a video in order to facilitate their purchase.

This option is available to content creators for their own channels. This time, YouTube has decided to create a kind of general “home shopping” channel, which marks a first for the platform.

While the Meta group has decided to pull back on its forays into live commerce, Alphabet, the parent company of YouTube, has chosen to focus on the Asian market, where live online commerce is all the rage.

“It’s still a nascent business, but we see lots of potential and making it easier for people to shop from the creators, brands and content they love,” Google CEO Philipp Schindler said earlier this year regarding shoppable YouTube on Alphabet’s fourth-quarter 2022 earnings call.

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