Why it matters:
- Today’s small businesses face high customer acquisition costs and need more low-cost ways to expand their reach and grow their customer base.
- Consumers are increasingly relying on social networks for shopping inspiration and are purchasing products through sites like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, with social shopping poised to exceed $100 billion in the U.S. by 2026.
- Leaning into the trend, website builder Wix is integrating with YouTube so that Wix merchants can feature their products on the channel in a store format, helping SMBs meet customers where they increasingly shop.
To help its small- and medium-sized business (SMB) customers meet their consumers where they shop, Website builder Wix last year integrated with Google Shopping. By seamlessly selling products on the site, Wix merchants have been able to reach an even wider audience, with Google Search expanding their customer base.
“The Google integration is going really well,” Oren Inditzky, Vice President and General Manager of Online Stores at Wix told CO—. Wix currently powers over 3 million e-commerce sites, and its customers are increasingly embracing the integration as word spreads about the benefits of Google Shopping, including boosting customer engagement, growing sales, and strengthening relationships with consumers who prefer the shorter path to purchase, he said.
Now Wix is hoping to duplicate that success via the social shopping collaboration it forged with YouTube
this year.
Enabling social shopping has turned out to be a simple and attractive marketing and sales tool, said Inditzky, especially since small businesses today face skyrocketing customer acquisition costs and need more low-cost ways to expand their reach.
With the YouTube partnership, Wix merchants have the option to easily feature their products — as displayed on their e-commerce sites — in a store format directly on their YouTube profile. “With just a couple of clicks, your catalog is synced,” Inditzky said. “You build your catalog once … then you manage it all in one spot.”
Wix’s collaboration leans into the growing trend of social shopping, which turns passive social scrolling into active shopping. Customers are increasingly purchasing products through social media sites like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok as people rely more on social connections and influencers to get their product recommendations and purchase ideas. Social buying is expected to exceed $100 billion in the United States alone by 2026.
The partnership directly connects Wix businesses with YouTube’s over 2 billion monthly users and product videos that drive high engagement. Wix merchants can tag products in YouTube videos, live streams, and shorts, and their products are featured directly on the YouTube store tab, where viewers can easily access them for purchase.
Merchants can also track the sales performance of tagged products via YouTube’s analytics tools, gaining valuable insights into customers’ shopping behavior and product popularity, Inditzky said.
Wix handles the back-end processes, syncing product information, managing inventory, and facilitating checkout. Changes to product descriptions and images are automatically synced between Wix and YouTube, which is designed to give consumers a consistent, up-to-date shopping experience across platforms and make information management seamless.
“It really does provide a lot of flexibility for merchants selling their goods, and we have seen pretty robust adoption,” he said.
[Read more: Salesforce, Intuit, and ADP Execs on AI-Powered Solutions Designed to Fuel SMB Growth in 2025]
Wix: ‘Social shopping has completely transformed the way that people discover and purchase products.’
Today, “People are no longer just crawling social media for entertainment,” Inditzky said. “Social shopping has completely transformed the way that people discover and purchase products. It’s really blurred the lines between entertainment and shopping, allowing users to go from discovery to checkout without ever leaving their apps.”
As more consumers consult social media before making a purchase, social media platforms in turn have created seamless shopping features to keep customers in-app. For example, shopping with Pinterest’s Shop the Look is almost instant, while live shopping events and videos depicting products in action on platforms like YouTube create a sense of buying urgency. The U.S. livestream shopping market alone is projected to reach $68 billion by 2026, up from $20 billion in 2022.
Meanwhile, today’s consumers often trust influencers more than they do traditional brand advertisements. A report from influencer marketing company IZEA Worldwide Inc. shows that 77% of respondents prefer content that’s been created by social media influencers over scripted advertising from marketing professionals.
People are no longer just crawling social media for entertainment,’ Inditzky said. ‘Social shopping has completely transformed the way that people discover and purchase products. It’s really blurred the lines between entertainment and shopping, allowing users to go from discovery to checkout without ever leaving their apps.
Oren Inditzky, Vice President and General Manager of Online Stores at Wix
“Now, because people spend so much time on social media, it’s where they’re expecting to get their inspiration,” said Inditzky, “and the social media platforms are really optimizing for shopping. If they provide these e-commerce features, they can lock in some revenue.”
TikTok helped supercharge social shopping, said Minda Smiley, Senior Analyst of Social Media at eMarketer. But the trend has extended well beyond TikTok now.
“We’re certainly seeing social commerce grow in the U.S.,” she said. “There’s a lot of momentum,” even though U.S. consumers lag behind those in Asia who’ve more fully embraced the trend.
Younger generations — Gen Z and millennials, especially — are more comfortable with social shopping, she added.
“It’s definitely something that small businesses should be thinking about to figure out what works for them.”
[Read more: Marketers from Kellogg to Walmart Optimize QR Codes to Drive Consumer Engagement and Sales]
To scale a business today, tapping multiple online channels can be ‘a very successful strategy.’
Wix’s foray into helping its merchants offer social shopping was a natural extension of its prior integrations with online marketplaces, including Amazon and eBay, said Inditzky.
“We saw where the industry was headed with social shopping, and we wanted our merchants to be at the head of this ship,” he said.
Growth and scalability come from selling across multiple online channels. Businesses that do so tend to perform better, he added.
“There are a lot of tools you can use to expand beyond your immediate current audience,” said Inditzky, “and using multiple channels is a very successful strategy.”
Wix also has social shopping integrations with Google Ads and Meta. Its investment in social commerce, automation, and artificial intelligence-driven tools to help SMBs optimize their online presence is part of Wix’s broader strategy to provide scalable solutions that adapt to evolving consumer behaviors, Inditzky added.
Increasingly, social platforms will become shopping destinations, said eMarketer’s Smiley.
“It’s going to become more normalized, so the more you can integrate it, and the more seamless the experience is for the user, the more helpful that’s going to be,” Smiley said.
Part of the challenge going forward, Inditzky said, will be to ensure customers experience zero social shopping friction as sites continue to add new features.
Inditzky also anticipates evolving technologies like augmented reality devices and voice recognition will play a major role in social shopping in the not-too-distant future. For example, years from now, a customer could walk down the street, spot an outfit they like, see it on themselves in a virtual fitting room, then use their voice to buy.
“All of the components are really there,” Inditzky said. “We just need tighter connections between the various players, and I do think the economics will push it to that stage.”
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