Amazon is continuously improving and expanding its business by offering new experiences and innovative features to its consumers. In a similar bid, the company announced on Wednesday, July 19, that it would be launching a new service, which will allow Amazon’s shoppers to interact with each other and discover better products offered by the retailer. This new social media will be called Spark.
What is Spark?
The new program being launched by Amazon will let users post images of products, along with stories and ideas, related to the items that are purchased from Amazon’s stores.
This, in turn, can be viewed by other Spark users, who can post comments or give a ‘smile’ to a particular post, similar to Facebook’s Like feature. Some users have also compared the new program to the likes of Instagram and Pinterest as it lets users post in a feed style interface.
Amazon may be launching Spark to encourage customers to share their experiences with the products that they purchased and also Amazon’s services in this inbuilt program itself, rather than speaking on off-site apps and programs, such as other social media platforms. In Spark, people will also be able to buy a certain product from Amazon directly, with just a touch of a button. Amazon is encouraging Spark users to tag a particular product that they are talking about or posting about on the platform.
In this way, people who view a post can see the tagged image of the product and purchase it if they wish to.
Spark is currently available for the iOS Amazon app only, and only Amazon Prime users can post on the platform. Non-Amazon Prime members will be able to see the various posts on Spark, but will not be able to comment or post themselves.
Spark is also only compatible with the iOS device currently and will not work on Android or the computer. Amazon did not state whether it plans to release the feature to these platforms as well in the future.
How to use the service?
First-time users will have to log in to their respective Amazon accounts on their phones. Spark can be found in the Program and Features section in the menus of the app.
To set up the platform, users will have to select at least five interests or categories of products which they are likely to buy. Users can pick more than five options, but at least five is needed to proceed.
Users will then have to provide their names and select their notification settings for Spark posts and comments. After this, the user is free to start perusing the long list of feeds and read the various product reviews, see images of products in use and much more. It remains to be seen how much impact Spark can create among the Amazon users.
