Amazon's Trial in New Shopping Formats

Spark's original intention was actually good, and the main image format was very impressive for potential buyers. However, compared with other platforms that transformed from social to e-commerce, Amazon's Spark seemed too utilitarian. Social software with a natural transaction gene easily made users feel repulsive. Finally, after Instagram began internal testing of the shopping module, Spark quietly withdrew from the market. However, the data accumulated by Amazon through this project was inherited into the new feature #FindItOnAmazon. The latter is a separate page that provides customized product display pages for planned users and is not fully open.

After shutting down Spark, Amazon Posts, another feature that Amazon was preparing, came out.

Posts is a bit like Spark, but in essence it is a social function that is oriented towards sharing shopping experience, where sellers/media take the lead in posting and buyers reply to inquiries. This form avoids direct confrontation with social giants and can also make full use of Amazon's existing advantages in the e-commerce field. At the same time, Amazon has also incorporated Posts into the advertising system, and the official has discovered its potential as a new form of in-site advertising. Posts and in-site advertising have many similarities, such as display location, matching logic, etc. This function is an additional way for consumers to understand products, and it has almost no social meaning.

Similar to the Posts feature is the “Editor’s Recommendation” feature, which was launched in a small-scale internal test a few years ago.

This column appears directly on the consumer search results page. Initially, it only displayed Amazon products mentioned in some product soft articles on external websites. Integrating product links and editorial soft articles in the search results is very helpful for conversion. Later, Amazon expanded the threshold for "Editor's Recommendation ", and many Internet celebrities and KOLs can participate in this column. The display position of "Editor's Recommendation " is the third column of the search results page. This position is quite golden and its importance is self-evident.