It an effort to differentiate itself from competitors, Snapchat has come up with a method that allows users search for items on Amazon using their smartphone’s camera and the app to identify products.
In a rare partnership for Amazon, the commerce giant and Snapchat aim to challenge Instagram and Pinterest for social shopping supremacy.
Users can use Snapchat’s camera to scan a physical object or bar-code, which will bring up a card showing that item and similar ones along with their title, price, thumbnail image, average review score and Prime availability. When a user taps on a card, they will be redirected to Amazon’s app or website to buy the product.
The Snapchat camera feature will determine if the user is scanning a song, QR Snapcode or object. Then Amazon’s machine vision tech will scan to recognize logos, artwork, package covers or other unique identifying marks to locate the product.
The feature is currently still a work in progress, so it will only be rolling out to a small percentage of U.S. users before being made available in other countries.
Social commerce is at an all time high, especially since Instagram launched Shopping tags in Stories and a dedicated Shopping channel in Explore. Pinterest also opened up Shop the Look pins and has hit 250 million monthly users.
The partnership between Amazon and Snapchat to create the new feature hopes to mesh well with Snap’s young and tech-savvy audience.
By: Maytinee Kramer
