Amazon launches Amazon Spark, a social sharing platform that shortens the path between product discovery and product purchase.
When I was a kid, my sisters and I used to wait with breathless anticipation for the new editions of our favorite catalogue.
At age 8, it was the American Girl doll catalogue–we marked the pages of the tiny dresses and furniture we planned to request for Christmas.
Around age 12, it was the Delia's catalogue that we slavered over, circling jean skorts and Doc Marten boots with a red Sharpie.
When we got a little older, we'd furtively page through the Victoria's Secret catalogue, trying to imagine ourselves in a life where such elaborate contraptions lurked under our clothes.
Nowadays, when the odd catalogue shows up at my house, I promptly sock it away for art projects and just as promptly call the company to take my name off the mailing list. Because the earth. And also because it's just not as fun as it used to be–I'm used to stuff being available all the time, a few keyboard clicks away.
Well, leave it to our favorite selling platform to put the social fun back into shopping, while making it easier than ever to find the stuff you love. No Sharpie required.
[Tweet “Find out how @amazon Spark puts the social fun back into shopping.”]Announcing Amazon Spark!
Last week, Amazon launched Amazon Spark, a mobile app that seamlessly combines photo sharing with shopping. It combines the discovery factor of paging through a product catalogue with the creative stimulus of trading stories with peers about how to use a product.
You know how often you scroll through Instagram and think “Dang, I love her shoes” or “Where do you even get a dining room table like that?” Amazon Spark offers an instant answer to those questions, along with the next logical step: letting you move seamlessly from discovery to placing an order.
Spark can be found in the “Programs and Features” menu in the Amazon mobile app.
You set it up by selecting at least five interests that you want to follow. (You can definitely pick more.) Using this information, Amazon Spark will create a customized feed of products, imagery and ideas related to the stuff you're into.
This feed comes from Amazon's own archive of product photos, but it also pulls from a growing tribe of Amazon Spark users, who are encouraged to post stories, ideas and images of products they love on the app. (If you share, you get a badge!)
Your Spark feed will offer you a daily stream of images, ideas, links, polls, and stories around your interests. Some will be just photos; others will be personal product reviews. You can comment, “smile” (the Spark version of “like”) or…the piéce de resistance…click the shopping bag icon in the bottom right corner and go right to the product that caught your eye.
If you're a veteran Instagrammer, you're familiar with products being tagged in images. You tap the photo, find a slew of Instagram handles tagged within it, click the one hovering over the shoes or the backpack or whatever it might be, and then you're led to the product's own Instagram page. Fine…but where's the actual product you were looking for? Is it even still available? Do they have it in other colors? You might have to spend hours hunting down the exact pair of shoes that tickled your fancy.
Amazon Spark transforms that whole situation by giving you instant access to the products that turned you on. The product images in Amazon Spark are directly connected to Amazon inventory. And that little shopping bag icon? There's a number on it that indicates how many items from the photo can be purchased on Amazon’s site.
[Tweet “Little things make all the difference. @amazon does these little things better than just about anybody.”]This is just another example of Amazon taking something that already exists and doing it a little bit better. It's that little bit that makes all the difference.
Trading out our consumer hats for the small business owner hats for just a moment, we love how Amazon is always finding ways to leverage their existing assets into something that can benefit their customers in new ways. Spark is making ingenious use of an asset that's been on Amazon since it began–customers' user profiles! Those have always been there, an ignored byproduct of creating product reviews.
Up until now, the interactions on Amazon have been between the company and the consumer. But now they're connecting their consumers to each other, building them into a cohesive community around Amazon and its offerings. As a small business owner, that's pretty much your holy grail.
(Bonus! On July 30, Spark will allow users to share their previously written product reviews from their profile to Spark.)
Could This Be the Future of Social Sharing?
Here's how TechCrunch sees the potential of Amazon Spark:
In the future, one could imagine that users will also be able to generate some sort of income via their Spark postings. Making money from product suggestions posted to Spark is not an aspect to this program Amazon is prepared to discuss today. But an influencer-courting service like this will eventually need to nail down a monetization angle if it truly wants to challenge Instagram – a place where the most-followed users can make five or six figures for their posted photos and campaigns.
From our perspective, Spark could be a truly amazing bonus for Amazon sellers. You can literally borrow Amazon's own strategy in creating Spark to build community with your own customers. In the process, you can create a direct pathway from their discovery of your products to their purchase.
What do you think? Have you tried Spark yet? Do you plan to use it and/or share your own content on it?
