YouTube lets U.S. creators tag Amazon products for commissions

YouTube announced Thursday that eligible creators in the U.S. can now tag Amazon products in their content and earn a cut of sales, with tagging available across shorts, long-form videos, and livestreams. The update turns product recommendations into a more direct revenue stream for creators and gives Amazon’s catalog a native presence inside one of the most popular video platforms.

YouTube already runs a Shopping affiliate program with participating retailers, but folding in Amazon’s catalog lets creators recommend products through a native integration rather than pasting Associates links into a video description and hoping viewers copy them before buying. Amazon will supply YouTube with a curated catalog of trending and highly requested products for creators to tag; if a creator wants to tag a specific product that isn’t in the catalog, they can request it through YouTube Support. The feature also includes auto-tagging, which — if enabled — lets YouTube’s systems review a creator’s recent uploads to identify and tag eligible Amazon products automatically.

Creators won’t see earnings broken down by product or video in their analytics, but they will see overall daily earnings in YouTube Studio; if a viewer returns an item, the commission is deducted from the creator’s balance. Only eligible U.S. creators can tag Amazon products for now, but those tags can be seen globally: YouTube says it may automatically match a tagged product with a trusted local merchant offer so creators can earn commissions on eligible international purchases, and where no local merchant is available, the tag routes viewers to the Amazon U.S. site, with commission earned if the purchase completes there. To qualify, creators must be enrolled in YouTube’s Partner and Shopping Affiliate programs, hold an active Amazon Influencer or Associates account, and link it to their YouTube channel.

Why it matters

By making Amazon’s catalog natively taggable, YouTube is competing more directly with TikTok Shop and Instagram’s native commerce tools for creator-driven purchases — and Amazon gets a distribution channel into video content without building its own creator platform.