(AP) NEW YORK — Amazon has apparently caught the TikTok bug and has decided to join the ranks of other businesses looking to attract customers by releasing imitations of the well-known social media platform.
The e-commerce behemoth has been testing a feed on its app that allows users to swipe through user-posted product images and videos that resemble those on TikTok.
Customers may like, save, and share product-related posts using the tool called Inspire, and they can also buy items directly from the feed, according to Watchful Technologies, an Israeli artificial intelligence company that tracks features in apps.
The test does not imply that Amazon will release the widget in its current form or even at all. An Amazon spokesperson, Alyssa Bronikowski, declined to say whether the company intends to make the tool available to all of its users. Bronikowski said in a statement that the business “continually tests innovative technologies to help make consumers’ life a little bit simpler.”
The test was initially covered by The Wall Street Journal. The Journal also reported, citing an unnamed source, that the business is testing the function among a small group of Amazon staff members.
Amazon frequently tests out new features, perhaps even limiting its tests to particular areas. According to research firm Marketplace Pulse, the corporation had been trying how to identify its brands in search results by marking them with tags like “Amazon brand” or “Exclusive to Amazon” under regulatory pressure about its private-label operations.
According to Daniel Buchuk, a researcher with Watchful Technologies, the experimental TikTok-like feed primarily displays photographs in its current format. Buchuk believes that if the functionality is implemented, the stream will be heavily video-focused as Amazon sellers provide material to make it more interesting for users.
In an effort to keep users addicted to their services so they can keep increasing their revenue, Google and Facebook, the two biggest sellers in digital advertising, have already been promoting their own TikTok clones.
After first testing it in India during 2020, Google’s YouTube video service rolled out a “Shorts” feature limited to clips of a minute or less last year in the United States. Google reported in June of this year that YouTube Shorts was bringing in more than 1.5 billion viewers who were logged in each month, but analysts think TikTok’s popularity is hurting the video site’s ad sales.
Google’s most recent quarterly numbers, which showed YouTube’s year-over-year ad sales growth had dropped to its worst pace since the site’s revenue started to be made public, increased those worries.
Reels, Facebook’s response to TikTok, is now available on both its main social networking service and the Instagram app, both of which are now run as part of Meta Platforms. Reels account for more than 20% of people’s Instagram usage, according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who made this claim earlier this year.
However, it’s unclear whether engagement is influencing ad sales given that Meta recently revealed its first quarterly revenue decline over the previous year since Facebook went public ten years ago.
