Amazon Inspire – Its Latest Attempt at a Social Media-Like Shopping Experience

Amazon Inspire is the company’s latest attempt at creating a following for a TikTok or Instagram-like shopping experience built directly into its app.

What you need to know: Amazon Inspire is a short-form video and photo feed allowing shoppers to discover and shop for products tailored to their interests.

As more brands flock to social media platforms to tell a story, directly or through influencers, it creates a disconnect with shoppers having to switch between apps, potentially creating friction in conversion.

Amazon Inspire will enable brands to feature social media-styled content within the company’s ecosystem in a format that shoppers are familiar with on platforms like TikTok or Instagram.

What they said: “We invent every day to make shopping easy and fun,” said Oliver Messenger, director of shopping at Amazon.

“Inspire is our new shopping experience that connects Amazon customers with shoppable content created by other customers, the latest influencers, and a wide range of brands.

“In just a few taps, customers can discover new products or get inspiration on what to buy, all tailored to their interests, and then shop for those items on Amazon.”

How it works: Shoppers open the Amazon Shopping app and tap the Inspire icon (a “light bulb” icon) to use the new feed.

On the first launch, customers are prompted to set up their personalized feed from over 20 interests, including Makeup, Men’s or Women’s Style, Travel, Pets, Hair Care, Gaming, and more.

Once the user selects all their interests, Inspire will create a shoppable feed with personalized content from photo and video content.

Now the shopper will scroll through photo and video content in a format similar to TikTok or Instagram.

Products featured in the content have shoppable links that pop up product information with more details, including reviews.

But most importantly, the shopper can add the item to the Amazon cart for immediate or later checkout.

Content Creation: Just about anyone can create content for Inspire, Amazon customers, influencers, and brands.

However, the two primary creators that will benefit most from this new shopping experience are influencers and brands.

Influencers will need to be part of the Amazon Influencer Program to earn commissions from sales directed through the shoppable links.

And brands must be active and enrolled in Brand Registry with a Brand Store from where their qualifying photos in Brand Posts can appear in the Inspire feed.

I want to give it a spin: Amazon is slowly rolling out Inspire in the United States now, with all US customers having access to the new shopping experience in the coming months.

The company did not specify when or if it would expand Amazon Inspire to other countries.

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