Amazon appears to be getting the TikTok bug, joining other companies seeking to capture the attention of consumers by offering replicas of the popular social platform.
The e-commerce giant is testing a feed on its app that enables shoppers to scroll through TikTok-like photos and videos of products posted by other users.
Using a feature called Inspire, customers can like, save and share products’ posts and more directly from the feed, according to Watchful Technologies, an Israeli-based artificial-intelligence firm that analyzes the app and tracks the feature. Items can be purchased.
The trial doesn’t mean that Amazon will be rolling out the widget in its current form to the public — or at all. Amazon spokeswoman Alyssa Bronikowski declined to say whether the company plans to offer that to all of its customers. Bronikowski said in a statement that the company is “continuously testing new features to help make customers’ lives a little easier.”
Wall Street Journal first informed of on test. Citing an undisclosed source, the Journal also said that the company is testing the feature among a small number of Amazon employees.
Amazon frequently experiments with new features, sometimes even targeting its tests in specific regions. Amid regulatory pressure about its private-label business, the company can identify its brands in search results by tagging them with badges such as “Amazon Brand” or “Exclusive to Amazon,” research firm Marketplace Pulse discovered earlier this year. was testing. ,
Daniel Buchuk, a researcher at Watchful Technologies, said that in its current form, the experimental TikTok-like feed mostly shows pictures. But if the feature is rolled out, Buchuk suspects the feed will be video-heavy as Amazon sellers create content to make it more attractive to customers.
The corporate parents of Google and Facebook, the two biggest vendors in digital advertising, are already pushing for their own TikTok clones with an eye on their services so they can continue to boost their revenue.
Google’s YouTube video service introduced a “shorts” feature limited to clips of one minute or less in the US last year after initially testing it out in India during 2020. As of June this year, Google said that YouTube Shorts was attracting more than 1.5 billion logins. – in users every month, although analysts believe that the popularity of TikTok is driving down ad sales on the video site.
Those concerns were heightened by Google’s latest quarterly results, which showed that YouTube’s year-over-year growth in ad sales had slowed at a staggering pace since the site’s revenue began to be publicly disclosed.
Meanwhile, Facebook now offers its own take on TikTok with a short-form video feature called Reels on its Instagram app as well as its main social networking service, which is now operating as part of the meta platform. . Earlier this year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that reels account for more than 20 percent of the time people spend on Instagram.
But it’s unclear whether engagement is helping to drive ad sales after Meta recently reported its first year-over-year decline in quarterly revenue since Facebook went public a decade ago.
