The portal, which the company named Inspire, will show users a continuous feed of photos and videos featuring products that customers can purchase through the app. With the launch of Inspire, Amazon is delving further into social shopping and joining Facebook, Google and others who have tried to bridge online shopping and social experiences, but have had limited success thus far.
Amazon has a user base of hundreds of millions of customers. Short-form video “is an incredibly useful medium of helping people discover and understand products,” Oliver Messenger, Amazon’s director of shopping, said in an interview. “Video-based content really helps [customers] to understand the product more.”