Amazon’s new TikTok-like shopping feed has rolled out to all U.S. users. Known as Inspire, it was previously available in closed beta, containing short-form videos and photos that feature products for sale on Amazon. In short, it’s meant to boost eCommerce by appealing to the digital habits of Gen-Z.
It’s also meant to bring product discovery and inspiration to Amazon’s otherwise intent-driven use case. This will be fueled by product placement in virally-fueled videos from influencers, brands, and even other shoppers. Besides TikTok, this discovery concept plucks from the Pinterest playbook.
This makes shoppability – though dressed in social content – the endgame. Aligned with the broader shoppability trend, it’s all about integrating transactional calls to action in social media. The goal is to reduce the friction traditionally seen in social commerce, including stopping to go search for a product.
Lightbulb Moment
To get started with Inspire, users can access it in Amazon’s Shopping app where a lightbulb icon is placed prominently on the bottom navigation bar. They can then personalize the feed by choosing from 20 categories including design, travel, fitness, pets, skincare, gaming, and a handful of others.
After that initial setup, the feed will customize itself over time using shoppers’ behavior, likes, and purchases. Amazon also wants to get things rolling by seeding the content with a handful of brands and influencers. It has already lined up influencers like Mae Badiyan, Practically Pursia, and others.
As for the feed itself, it contains video and images, making it a sort of hybrid between TikTok and Instagram. Speaking of the latter, users can likewise double-tap an item to like it. The broader feed is all TikTok however, including swiping up to see the next video and engagement buttons on the right.
Those engagement buttons are perhaps the most important part because they lead users where Amazon wants them to go – product listings. After tapping, users see pop-up overlays on a given video or image, which makes the UX a bit more elegant. A “see all details” option lets them jump to the product page.
Copy, Paste
Sticking with that last point, if a buy button is offered right within the social discovery app you’re already on, you don’t need to leave that app… which is good for the user and the social channel (read: lesser bounce rate). And it’s good for privacy-friendliness as the insular UX means that it’s all first-party data.
Of course, Amazon has an advantage here as eCommerce is its native strength. Others that integrate shoppability have to build those tools, or partner with Amazon to link off to its product listings. Amazon already has that core functionality… though it’s admittedly not natively primed for social products.
The latter is where Amazon’s success with the Inspire feature will fly or die. Can it emulate the vibes of TikTok without seeming too contrived or commercial? That could be a challenge given that users are good at detecting such intent. Then again, they’re very accepting of Shoppabilty efforts on Instagram.
Meanwhile, copying features has become accepted practice in big tech. Meta copies Snap, Google copies Meta (and everyone copies TikTok). This trend accelerated a few years ago with Instagram’s high-profile copy of Snapchat’s Stories format. We’ll see if Amazon can have the same success.
