Amazon’s two-year-old competitor to Instagram, Amazon Spark, is no more.
Hoping to capitalize on the social shopping trend and harness the power of online influencers, Amazon in 2017 launched its own version of Instagram with a customizable news and photo feed for Prime members. The experiment known as Amazon Spark has come to an end. However, learnings from Spark and Amazon’s discovery tool, Interesting Finds, are being combined into a new socially inspired product, #FindItOnAmazon.
Amazon Spark had been a pretty smooth service, if the truth be told. Unlike Instagram, where people follow their friends, interests, brands they like, and people they find attractive or inspiring, Spark focused on shopping and selling. While trying to poke fun at the Instagram aesthetic at times with fashion-inspired images or high-quality travel photos, it lacked the broader appeal of Instagram. Your friends weren’t there and there was no Instagram story, for example. Everything felt too transactional.
Amazon declined to comment on the apparent shutdown of Spark, but the service is no longer on the website or in the app.
Meanwhile, the URL amazon.com/spark redirects to the new #FoundItOnAmazon site, a site that also looks a lot like another Amazon product discovery tool, Interesting Finds.
Interesting Finds has been around since 2016, offering consumers a way to navigate an almost Pinterest-like product board across various categories. It features theme-focused “stores” such as a “Daily Carry” store for collectibles, a “Mid Century” store full of furniture and decor, a “Star Wars” fan shop, one for someone who loves color. pink, and so on. Interesting Finds later added a layer of personalization with the introduction of a My Mix store with recommendations tailored to your interactions and tastes.
The Interesting Finds site had a clean, modern look that made it a more pleasant way to browse Amazon products. Product photos appeared on white backgrounds as clutter was removed from a traditional product detail page.
We understand from people familiar with the products that Interesting Finds is not shutting down like Spark has. But the new #FoundItOnAmazon site will take inspiration from what worked with Interesting Finds and Spark to turn it into a new shopping discovery tool.
Interesting finds cover a wide range of categories, but #FoundItOnAmazon will focus more directly on fashion and home decor. Similar to cool finds, you can access your favorite items and visit them again later.
The #FoundItOnAmazon site is very new and is not currently showing up for all Amazon customers at this time. If you have it, the URL for amazon.com/spark will take you there.
Although Amazon isn’t talking about why it’s ending its Instagram experiment, it’s not that difficult to make some guesswork. Beyond its lack of originality and transactional nature, Instagram itself has become a much more formidable competitor since the launch of Spark.
Last fall, Instagram fully embraced its commercial character with the introduction of in-app shopping features that make it easier for people to discover products from Instagram photos. It also added a new shopping channel and in March, Instagram launched its own in-app payment option to turn product inspiration into actual conversions.
Without a doubt it was a great movement in the Amazonian territory. And while that made headlines about Instagram as the future of shopping, it’s not going to alter Amazon’s overall dominance anytime soon.
That said, the Instagram changes may have led Amazon to stop trying to build its own Instagram clone, so it could focus on building better and more differentiated tools for product discovery, like the new site.
