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Amazon has quietly launched its own direct challenger to Pinterest with the debut of a feature called “
Amazon Collections.”
It’s a more attractive, image-heavy website where consumers can save,
share and discover new products by browsing those others have saved.
Like Pinterest, users create separate lists, called Collections, such as
“Want List” or “Fashion,” for example, and they can find and follow
other users who share their same interests through the service.
The company had been testing this feature beginning with a number of
bloggers ahead of a larger, public debut, and some of those with early
access have
already detailed their experiences using the site to put together outfits, or
other
initial impressions. Some were even paid to be advisors. The earliest
references we’re seeing from beta testers writing about the service were
posted in late April.
Today, the link to “Your Collections” appears in the list of options
when you hover over “Your Account” from the drop-down menu on
Amazon.com’s homepage, which gives the service a more prominent
placement on Amazon’s site.
Initially, all users start off with a few empty collections (“My
Style,” “Want List,” and “Possibilities”) but you can make your own
Collections, too. To add an item to a Collection, you simply click on
an “Add to Collection” button below the product image on Amazon.com’s
website. However, because Collections is a new feature, this button has
not yet been rolled out to all the products on.
techcrunch.com
To work around this problem, Amazon provides a “Collect” button that
can be dragged to your browser’s bookmarks bar, letting you add any
product on Amazon to your collections. This does not appear to be a way
to “collect” non-Amazon products at this time, though, as nothing
happens when that buttons is clicked off-site.
Users can add descriptions for their saved items, edit or remove them
from their lists, or even delete entire collections at once. The
service also offers a way for users to browse through default categories
like Books, Men’s Fashion, Movies, Music, Women’s Fashion, Featured,
and more, all of which are laid out in a Pinterest-inspired image
pinboard format where there’s heavy emphasis on the item photo and
little other info besides the product name and a “heart” button for
favoriting things. In order to see pricing and further product details,
you have to click through.
Currently, Amazon Collections’ friending and following model is
limited — the site shows the popular items others are pinning to which
boards and when they posted those items (e.g. “3 minutes ago”), and you
can then click on those users’ names in order to follow them on the
service. But there doesn’t seem to be an option for discovering your
friends who are on Amazon Collections, such as through address book
upload or Facebook integration.
This is not Amazon’s first experiment with providing consumers with an
alternative way to shop its site, we should point out. In years past,
it has launched a number of other product visualization tools, like its
2008 grid-like storefront Amazon Windowshop, which later
arrived on iPad in 2010, or its
2011 dabble in augmented reality via Amazon Flow. It has also worked to make the site more social, through integrations with Facebook for
tracking birthdays or
figuring out what things Facebook friends want as gifts.
But this is the first time Amazon has gone so far as to boldly
duplicate the overall look-and-feel of a competing service, which, to
some extent, validates the traction Pinterest is seeing with e-commerce
referrals. The move also comes at a time when Pinterest has been beefing
up its e-commerce efforts, with new tools for online retailers,
including web and mobile
product pins,
analytics, personalized
recommendations, and,
just today, price alerts.
Read more :https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+collections+pinterest&client=firefox-a&hs=Tkc&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=fflb&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=icX7UaPOGbXc4APvn4HYAw&ved=
