Funny, @ericfeng and I were just chatting about this topic. Amazon has created an amazing destination when you know what you want to buy. People visit the site with specific intent. Their next big commerce opportunity is to solve the browsing use case, to help people buy things they didn't know existed or wanted. Pinterest started with this use case (of course, broadly focused on imagery but a large portion of pins are product-specific) and are now attempting to close the loop with buyable pins. This isn't the first attempt to create a browsing experience by Amazon. They launched Interesting Finds and Launchpad a few years ago. At first glance, I'm super intrigued by their execution as someone that has struggled to find the right furniture after I moved ~9 months ago. That said, I wonder if it lack some of the stickiness that Pinterest and other socially-driven platforms provide. Pinterest has become a utility, a thing that sits in your browser, accessible with a click. They also have social notifications, pulling users back to the service as their friends pin, message, etc. Curious to hear what others thing about this direction. 🤔

Data + personalisation, without the need for people to purchase. Not the first attempt at this from Amazon... https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/0... https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/0...

This is great but if I want proper product discovery I don't want to be limited to Amazon. This is what www.moonsift.com aim to do - an exciting new start-up to check out.

If Amazon is great for one thing, it is to find what you're looking for when you know what you want. But when you don't, this might just be a nightmare. This solution seems great, I will try it for sure.

I wanted to like this, but when I liked just 3 items I ended up getting a feed with 3 of the same item! I think it needs a little more work. For a retailer with so many items, there's really no reason to display the same item multiple times. Amazon in general needs a massive overhaul of search and discovery on their site. I usually find thing I want to buy from other places, and then look them up on Amazon manually and specifically. Frustrating!

Pros:

Cool idea

Cons:

Doesn't work

Looks super interesting but definitely not a Pinterest competitor in the direct sense. I have a lot of photography friends that use Pinterest for tutorials and posing ideas and other content like that. So calling this a Pinterest competitor isn’t exactly true, but in some ways it is. Looks interesting though. A lot of really cool things on Amazon that people don’t know about discovery has been a problem for them. This could help.

Interesting, huge amount of duplicates though and the suggestions don't seem to be getting vastly better.

Please don't compare this with Pinterest. Don't try to amazonize everything

Pros:

Same old Amazon

Cons:

Boring to use.

Will wait for its performance

Cool that Amazon is introducing it but the feature itself isn't new. I used it on Wayfair or a similar site a few months ago. Super helpful when you know what you want visually but can't describe it in words/a search.

Not sure about this. The difference between two products that you like or dislike could be so minute that it could easily confuse the AI and recommend wrong choices. Even with Amazon's current recommendations, they are way off the mark on many areas. Would it add value or create more noise and work for the end user to filter out?

This can be very useful tool

The layout/design reminds me of the previous UBER design.

This is clearly pretty intelligent - within just a few "likes" it seems to have discerned my taste without converging too much on a single aesthetic. Excited to see how they build this out!

It is certainly a very dangerous product for Pinterest's monetization strategy. Pinterest relies on integrations and crowdsourcing to build inventory, while Amazon has a huge accessible database. I believe that what Amazon is doing is a much more efficient buying discovery approach than buyable pins inside Pinterest. It's a very focused design that enables a single job to be done (discovering the best buying option in a category based on price/recommendations). We can expect Pinterest to steal back some ideas from Amazon very soon (e.g. price comparison). I still believe Pinterest has an edge in a multi-targeting approach. It does not depend on Amazon.com, or any other specific marketplace, so it can do things like price comparison across marketplaces, aggregate all the inventories to create the most compelling offering in visual search etc. but all of that depends on user engagement, deep integrations etc. Pinterest could also support much better smaller businesses and indie manufacturers that get lost in the Amazon Jungle.

Super interesting!!

I see the potential and can't wait for it to get better. At this point, I'm surprised they launched it with it being so buggy. Two clicks into dinnerware and I was getting figurines and sheets.

Too early to release. Made me go and try out Pinterest :)

Pros:

Improves UX of finding an item with hard to describe visual features

Cons:

Only few categories, limited selection, relies on visual features only.

Mentioning 'Pinterest' in their tagline is an indication that Amazon is ready for a battle. :)