The new trend is on the verge of death. How did Amazon ruin this feature?

Live streaming is the hottest and most cutting-edge new e-commerce trend. It has already reached its final stage in China. Top anchors have been banned for tax evasion. As for the live streaming function that Amazon tested a few years ago, it can only be described as a mess.

Although Amazon’s live streaming feature was launched in 2019, it painted a very bright prospect for both sellers and consumers. However, three years later, Amazon Live has still not been able to connect the entire live streaming ecosystem. The professionalism of the officially certified anchors is quite unreliable, and they have not been able to produce enough high-quality content to attract viewers. With a small audience, brands, sellers, and influential Internet celebrities are unwilling to invest in this area, which has created a vicious cycle, causing the once highly anticipated feature to deteriorate.

Amazon has made many attempts to this end. First, it added an official live broadcast module to last year’s Prime Day, which was always floating on the homepage of the website.

Then two months ago, Amazon completely reorganized the Live browsing experience, imitating other well-known video website competitors. However, these efforts cannot stop the decline of the live broadcast function. According to statistics from foreign media, Amazon Live currently has less than 1,000 active viewers per day at most.

With only so much traffic every day and too many sellers for too little porridge, it is difficult for sellers to have any motivation to run live broadcasts. Moreover, apart from the above efforts to promote traffic and user pages, Amazon does not seem to have made full efforts to promote the live broadcast module and attract new customers. Facing consumers, not to mention that there are no preferential activities to attract them to use and invest, Amazon has not even mentioned this function too much, and new sellers do not know that there is such a thing as live broadcasting.

As for the lack of content, Amazon itself must definitely be blamed. Although the live function has been online for so many years, it has never launched an incentive plan for sellers. There are very few sellers using live streaming. In new e-commerce trends such as social networking and live streaming, Amazon's performance is not ideal. This is related to the deep logic of Amazon's own website.

Amazon, which started out as a search-based e-commerce company, has already embedded an inherent concept in the minds of American consumers: I will only open Amazon when I know what I want to buy, search, and then find a suitable product to buy from the search results.

Regardless of whether it is social e-commerce or live streaming e-commerce, consumers are actually the ones who passively receive product information. Most of the consumers who watch live streaming and social media are not sure what they want to buy, and many of them don’t even have the intention to buy. Instead, they are inspired by KOLs when watching live streaming or social content and then make purchases. This is completely contrary to the underlying logic of Amazon’s expertise in active consumer shopping.

This is also the reason why Amazon is not doing well in social networking and live streaming e-commerce. It still uses the logic of active shopping to understand and develop its own live streaming e-commerce. This makes the live streaming content unattractive to consumers who just come to watch. In addition, as mentioned above, Amazon does not do any promotion at all, and most users don’t even know anything about live streaming. These two factors have caused the live streaming business to be in a semi-stagnant state.

What will be the next trend for Amazon? At least for now, it doesn’t seem to be live streaming or social networking. Perhaps Amazon can develop a new way of shopping that fits the underlying logic through proactive shopping.