Snap announced today that it has partnered with Amazon to bring more shoppable products into Snapchat, starting with eyewear. Products can be discovered, virtually tried on, and purchased. This end-to-end flow under one roof is meant to streamline shopping, with an emphasis on AR.
Launching with brands such as Maui Jim, Persol, Oakley and Ray-Ban, Amazon will provide the necessary product data and transactional back-end. This essentially brings Amazon Fashion into Snapchat’s environment, including live data on things like inventory and shipping.
Altogether, the partnership helps brands amplify their reach and get introduced to AR commerce. Amazon benefits from the same, as it reaches Snap’s 365 million daily active users to boost eCommerce volume. And Snap benefits from continuing to scale up its AR shopping ambitions.
“Amazon Fashion is always looking for new ways to collaborate with brands and create fun, innovative shopping experiences for customers,” said Amazon Fashion President Muge Erdirik Dogan. “Millions of customers regularly use Amazon’s AR shopping technology across categories in our stores, with Virtual Try-On for Eyewear being a long-time customer favorite. We are delighted to partner with Snapchat and further expand AR shopping for both fashion brands and today’s new generation of digital shoppers.”
Machine-Learning Magic
As background, this partnership builds on Snap’s Shopping Lenses. Utilized by brands like Puma and Chanel, this creates an easy way to build shoppable lenses in minutes. These are lenses that are discovered on Snapchat and distributed virally, featuring AR try-ons and transactional options.
Snap has since improved Shopping Lenses with a new AR image processing technology that makes it easier for brands to compose the 3D product models noted above. It utilizes brands’ existing 2D images, along with some machine-learning magic to generate 3D models to be used in AR try-ons.
Back to the Amazon partnership, Snapchat users can find new lenses on the @amazonfashion public profile on the Snapchat app, Snap’s Lens Explorer, the new “Dress-Up” tab, and the Snap Camera Lens Carousel. Once users discover and try-on products, they can tap once to check out through Amazon.
Meanwhile, this partnership comes as AR continues to evolve and scale as a shopping tool. To wrap some numbers around that scale, Snap, the clear leader in consumer AR, reports that 250 million Snapchatters have engaged with AR shopping Lenses 5 billion+ times over the past year.
Recession Proof
Panning back, this partnership is aligned with the rise of shoppability. As we continue to examine on Localogy Insider, this trend piggybacks on Covid-era eCommerce inflections and makes everything shoppable – from YouTube videos to Instagram Stories. AR adds value through 3D product visualization.
Now is the right time for this collision course of shoppability and AR. Both were given time to shine in the Covid Era when IRL shopping was locked down. Going forward, they’re driven by several macro factors including privacy. For example, end-to-end shopping under one roof utilizes only first-party data.
But for Snap, there’s a third reason: direct response advertising. AR – and broader product discovery on Snap – spans the consumer purchase funnel from upper-funnel awareness to lower-funnel action. But as noted in Snap’s Q3 earnings, the latter is more recession-proof, and an area Snap is driven to grow.
Speaking of growth, eyewear is a good place to start – given the popularity of selfies and enabling tech for face-tracking. But Snap and Amazon will expand this partnership to other product categories. Amazon has separately jumped into AR shoe try-ons and we’ll likely see many more categories follow.
