Amazon Launches Inspire, A TikTok-Like Shopping Experience Featuring Content From Creators & Brands
Source: Amazon
Months after internal tests, Amazon’s Inspire arrives. Available via a lightbulb icon in the navigation bar of the Amazon Shopping app, the new in-app personalized shopping experience delivers a TikTok-like feed featuring shoppable photos and videos based on users' selected interests and engagements.
How Inspire Works
When first getting started, shoppers can choose up to 20 interest categories like interior design, skincare, travel, wedding, hiking, gaming, pets, work from home, and more to indicate what type of brands and products they want to see. After that, they can scroll through video and photo content produced by everyday customers, influencers, and brands. Shoppers can like content and tap featured products to learn more, read reviews, and add to their cart to purchase.
What It Means For Creators
Ahead of the launch, Amazon recruited several creators to share content on Inspire, including Mae Badiyan and Practically Pursia. In addition, the photos and videos posted to the Amazon Influencer storefront of creators in the Amazon Influencer Program are eligible to appear in Inspire. When shoppers purchase products featured in their content, creators will earn a portion of the sale.
As Amazon Storefronts and affiliate links can be a sustainable source of revenue for some creators, adding a native social shopping feed will help creators drive more conversions. Today, many creators use Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, blogs, link-in-bio tools, and more to promote and drive traffic to products on Amazon. However, since audiences are required to go off platform to purchase on Amazon, there's often a significant drop-off.
Now with an in-app shopping experience, where creators can share content featuring Amazon products directly in the app, conversions will be much higher. There's less friction as shoppers can consume content, discover products, learn more about them, and purchase them all in one location. As a result, we may see creators focused on driving revenue to invest more in creating content for Inspire as opposed to other social media platforms since it will give them the best chance to drive purchases.
What It Means For Brands
Also, with an increased interest in brands promoting their products available on Amazon, we could see brands start to experiment with Inspire-focused influencer marketing campaigns. Instead of activating creators to produce content on Instagram and TikTok to drive audiences to their products on Amazon, brands could easily engage creators to create content specifically for Inspire to get in front of shoppers on Amazon who are already in purchasing mode.
Retailers Lean Into Social Commerce
With Inspire, Amazon leans further into social commerce, joining many other big tech companies looking to capitalize on the powerful combination of creators, content, and commerce.
Just as social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok are strengthening commerce features, retailers like Amazon and Walmart are expanding their social features. In the next few years, the lines between social media platforms and retailers will become blurrier.
