In 2018, Amazon launched a new social shopping platform Spark for the Indian market, a move aimed at locking in the future main force of Indian online retail – the “millennials”.
Spark is a shopping platform based on product sharing, which is currently open to all Prime members of Amazon India. Amazon officials said that this concept is to enhance consumers’ shopping participation experience and thus increase sales. In addition, Amazon also plans to use the content forwarded by users to promote sales.
Spark is a section launched by Amazon based on big data analysis and based on the interests of customers themselves, thus avoiding a large number of invalid conventional options during customer search. All customers need to do is to select the category they are interested in and then click to buy the product they like.
Amazon first launched the Spark platform in the US market in 2017. Customers can post photos of products they purchased on Amazon on the platform, and can also comment and like photos shared by others.
In recent years, social media has played a pivotal role in the sales process of e-commerce, especially the sales trend of fashion accessories and other categories on social media platforms is very impressive. Ezmall, Meesho, Shop101 and GlowRoad are typical social media e-commerce platforms in the Indian market. These platforms claim to have entered the Indian small business market on a large scale, surpassing e-commerce giants such as Amazon and Flipkart, and the launch of Amazon Spark website just shows that social media has posed a considerable threat to Amazon.