Amazon Launches TikTok-Style Feed feature for Social Shopping

Amazon launched a TikTok-inspired feature to showcase its products to customers Thursday, as more online platforms explore social commerce opportunities due to TikTok’s success.

Amazon launched the feature Thursday for select customers and plans to make it available across the U.S. in the coming months. The portal, which the company named Inspire, will show users a continuous feed of photos and videos featuring products that customers can purchase through the app.

Photo and video streams will be tailored to each user depending on their interests, allowing users to “like” a specific product before they purchase it.

The new feature will provide opportunities for Amazon to increase profits, as the company projected between $140 billion and $148 billion in fourth-quarter revenue in 2022, down from earlier projections of $155 billion.

Amazon has a user base of hundreds of millions of customers. Short-form video “is an incredibly useful medium of helping people discover and understand products,” Oliver Messenger, Amazon’s director of shopping, said in an interview. “Video-based content helps [customers] to understand the product more.”

Mr. Messenger said that while Inspire is shopping-focused, it has social traits and could expand into features such as options to share content and trending content. 

The Inspire portal will appear as a lightbulb-shaped icon at the bottom of Amazon’s app. When customers click on the widget, it will bring them to a feed that displays images and videos featuring products that shoppers can “like” and purchase. Shoppers can view item descriptions and add products to their shopping carts. 

Other companies, including Meta, Google’s Alphabet Inc., and Instagram, have launched similar social features in recent years to promote products available through their respective apps, as more than $226 billion was spent on social media advertising last year.