YouTube, Lazada partner on shopping affiliate program in Indonesia

YouTube has expanded its shopping affiliate program in Indonesia by partnering with ecommerce platform Lazada.

Indonesia was the first Southeast Asian market to launch the program, which allows creators to tag products in their videos.

Over the past year, watch time for shopping-related content in the country has surged by more than 400%.

Veronica Utami, Google Indonesia’s Country Director, said YouTube will continue supporting this trend as part of its commitment to an open ecosystem.

She added that public enthusiasm and the program’s potential have grown over the past year, helping both creators and brands.

YouTube reported that the number of channels in Indonesia with more than 1 million subscribers has doubled in the last year to over 3,000.

YouTube also said that 90% of viewers in Indonesia rely on the platform’s creators for product recommendations.

The company said the affiliate program is only available to creators in the YouTube Partner Program to ensure a safer shopping environment.

🔗 Source: YouTube

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

A 400% jump in shopping watch time implies engagement, yet YouTube has not shared commerce metrics like gross merchandise value (GMV), conversion rate, or average order value that tie views to buys.
TikTok Shop has generated over US$6 billion GMV in Indonesia, and the country’s social commerce market could reach US$22 billion by 2028 1. Without comparable figures from YouTube Shopping, we cannot tell if it competes at scale or only drives discovery without the sale.
The affiliate model, where creators earn commissions by tagging products that link out to external marketplaces such as Shopee (a major Southeast Asian e-commerce platform), keeps discovery on YouTube but puts checkout elsewhere 1. Attribution (tying a sale back to a specific video or link) gets messy, which makes it harder for merchants to verify revenue impact beyond early-stage product discovery.

Marketplaces and SaaS startups can build middleware (software that connects different systems) that syncs product catalogs across YouTube Shopping and major marketplaces 2. It can automate SKU feed management and track attribution.
Today, creators search products in YouTube Studio (the creator dashboard) using Google Merchant Center (Google’s product feed tool for merchants) data 2. This manual flow breaks at scale when managing hundreds of SKUs across multiple marketplaces. A single dashboard for bulk tagging, inventory sync, and cross-platform commission tracking would cut friction.
Feasibility hinges on application programming interface (API) access. YouTube Shopping plugs into Google Merchant Center 3. Platforms like impact.com (an affiliate and partnerships platform) already provide tracking infrastructure 4. The hard part is linking YouTube’s affiliate reports with Southeast Asian attribution systems to prove which sales came from tagged videos.