Thee-commerce major Amazon has reportedly launched its socialcommerce platform Spark in India after about a month of betatesting.
Spark is part of the Amazon.in site and is a place to discover things from people who share yourinterests. In Spark, you will first be prompted to select a few interests.
This development comes at a time when Facebook and Instagram also plan to get a pie of the growing e-commerce market in India. Under this, Amazon will create a feed of personalised content from other Amazon customers with similar interests. And if you like a product in, say, a photo that you see, you can tap on the product link to buy it. You can even interact with people by commenting on their posts.
This will enable the users to shop and also makes it easier to shop online, instead of wading throughhundreds of options that a regular search on Amazon throws up. Often, you maynot even realise that a certain option exists, till someone who shares yourinterest points it out.
Kishore Thota, Amazon’sdirector for marketing & customer experience said the company plansto leverage user generated content to drive further engagement.
“We have already seen good traction on the platform based on various user interests. The idea is to get the consumers more engaged instead of directly pushing sales. The stronger the engagements are, the better impact it will have on sales over a period of time. We are even working with brands and influencers for Spark. They will play a more vital role going into next year,” Thota said.
Spark will be available to all Amazon users in India. But the company will moderate its Instagram lookalike platform to remove any sort of “problematic” content.