YouTube Shopping will pay Indian creators a commission when their viewers buy tagged products on Amazon, Meesho, Snapdeal, AJIO and Tata CLiQ, after YouTube India added the five retailers to its affiliate programme on 24 September.
Creators can now tag 11 Indian retailers from one video
The five brands join Flipkart, Myntra, Nykaa, Purplle, Shopsy and Tira, which were already on the programme. A creator tags a product in a long-form video, Short or livestream and earns a commission when a viewer clicks through and buys, so one haul video can now link a Meesho kurta and a Tata CLiQ label side by side.
Amazon tagging will reach India within weeks, YouTube said at its Made on YouTube event a day earlier. The same update lets retailers offer creators exclusive commission rates or bonuses on specific products, and tags now switch to local offers for viewers abroad, with creators earning on those international sales.
For brand deals, Ask Studio will draft responses to brand briefs and build pitch material and media kits inside YouTube Studio. YouTube also announced dynamic brand segments, which let a creator insert one sponsored segment into up to 20 long-form videos at once.
Brands get a paid option in Affiliate Partnerships Boost, which runs a creator’s organic affiliate video as an ad, and Nykaa is the first Indian brand YouTube has named as using it, for festive-season sales.
YouTube launched the affiliate programme in India in October 2024 with only Flipkart and Myntra. More than half of eligible Indian creators have since enrolled and tagged over 19 million videos, while the programme has 1.3 million creators worldwide and gross merchandise value has grown 13x in two years, according to YouTube.
Product tags draw twice the clicks of description links
YouTube’s case for the expansion rests on one number: its product tags draw 2x the clicks of links in video descriptions. Amazon runs its own Associates programme, which creators typically use through description links, so every purchase that shifts to a YouTube tag moves the click data inside YouTube. Boost then turns those same videos into ad inventory that brands pay for, in a market where over 450 million logged-in users searched for shopping content on YouTube in June 2026.
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Creators with price-conscious audiences gain the most
For Indian creators, the bigger change is Meesho and Snapdeal. A fashion or home channel whose viewers shop on price had no way to earn from those purchases through YouTube’s tags until now.
Average affiliate payouts in India grew more than 160% between Q1 2025 and Q1 2026, per YouTube, and Meesho’s general manager for content commerce, Nikita Dawda, said the tie-up gives creators the “potential to double their earnings.” Agencies face a platform that now handles brief responses and pitching itself, backed by what YouTube says are hundreds of millions of dollars in agency incentives worldwide.
Amazon is due in India within weeks, while YouTube has given no date for AJIO, Meesho, Snapdeal and Tata CLiQ and has not disclosed commission rates for any of the five. The affiliate programme is set to cover 35 countries by the end of 2026.
