TikTok’s Coming for Amazon’s Search Traffic

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Amazon.com Inc. has long been the dominant platform where people start their shopping searches for everything from earbuds to summer dresses. But its grip over that first step in a shopper's journey is loosening as ByteDance Ltd.'s TikTok aggressively draws traffic and becomes a more popular place for people to shop. TikTok's growing influence has exposed Amazon's big weakness: for all its success in retail logistics, it's not really a fun place to browse or discover new trends.

Many giants have fallen in the cut-throat world of retail, and Amazon's frumpy, catalogue-style platform risks pushing it into irrelevancy among those in their teens and early twenties — the shoppers of tomorrow — who demand entertainment, engagement and a dash of the unexpected from the brands and platforms they spend time on. Take, for example, the last festive quarter when 67% of consumers quizzed by Jungle Scout about social media and gifting said TikTok was the most influential platform for gift ideas.Last month, Amazon announced steps to catch up with a new feed called Inspire, billed as helping it break into what retail experts call social commerce. Over the next few months, shoppers will see a lightbulb in the navigation bar of the Amazon app that will take them to curated reviews and ads for different products on the site. Think Instagram, but on Amazon. The idea is for shoppers to discover new things and feel influenced to buy the product with Amazon.

If that sounds familiar, it's probably because Amazon announced something similar not too long ago. Amazon Spark launched in 2017 as a feature within the app, where members of its Prime service could post pictures of products with reviews, and anyone scrolling through could like the