Amazon recently rolled out its attempt at competing in the short-form video space. The product is a TikTok look-alike called Inspire, which is prominently featured via the “lightbulb” icon on the high-traffic Amazon Shopping app in the U.S. But unlike its contemporaries, Inspire does not depend on advertisers to monetize.
With the feature predicated on featuring and promoting products available for sale on Amazon, the ability to upload vertical videos to the feed is available to creators who have signed up and been approved for Amazon’s Influencer Program.
While this new feature may be a no-brainer for creators who want to earn on affiliate sales by publishing videos they’re already producing for other platforms, Amazon is not making it easy. The product feature set, including a web-only dashboard, is seriously lacking and has no ability to scale for creators or their collaborators.
Currently, Amazon influencer accounts must access their video dashboard using a web-based login designed for desktop. From my personal experience, creators rarely (if ever) use anything other than iPhone-native apps for editing and uploading vertical videos. Platforms including TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts have made shooting, editing and uploading seamless. Inspire completely misses the mark with efficiency for sharing new video.
Once you’re logged into the dashboard, there is a very limited set of functionalities available. You can upload photo, videos and lists, and you then tag products and add a title. There’s little to no option to customize a video post using thumbnails, keywords, graphics and tagging. Once videos are published, there are very limited analytics and reporting, including no traffic source info on audience and sales.
As of today, most creators promote their Amazon Affiliate storefront using link-in-bio tools across their social platforms. In order for creators to invest more time and effort into the new Inspire feed, they’ll need to understand the size and demographic of the audience discovering their videos. This data needs to come from the Amazon platform directly.
The lightbulb icon is expensive real estate on one of the most trafficked apps in the world. However, Amazon is not giving creators the basic tools to capitalize on the platform’s built-in audience and product sales.
If they really want to see creators adapt to publishing on the platform then they’ll need to strike deals with industry leaders in licensing and aggregating second-run content like JellySmack and Wild Vision in the U.K. These companies can ensure bulk uploads are properly optimized for affiliate sales conversion. Right now, influencer accounts are unable to add multiple users or toggle between accounts (i.e., adding a rep account to help upload and manage your library).
This is a “mailbox-money” opportunity for creators, but based on the current toolset, there is no way to justify the time and effort needed for creators to personally upload individual video and product.
With almost 50% of the U.S. e-commerce market share already taking place on Amazon, the platform is well positioned for success in converting sales from a new video initiative. Creators are more eager than ever to diversify their revenue streams — but they remain limited in bandwidth. Hopefully, Amazon will put a little more juice (as in, dollars and tools) behind this and showcase successful case studies of big earners in order to attract more top-tier creators. If you build it (correctly), they will come.
Adam Wescott is the chief content officer of Creator+, as well as a strategic adviser and angel investor under his consultancy firm, Mind Chatter Media
