Amazon sides with Snapchat towards Social Commerce

According to the popular media TechCrunch,through a revision of the code of one of the latest versions of the social network, there have been found references to a very interesting feature that has not been released yet. 

This is what has been called as Project Eagle which is, no more, no less, the fact of providing the mobile camera the ability to recognize objects and barcodes, Once they are interpreted, they will redirect directly to the product´s info sheet on Amazon in order to make the purchase. 

Actually, the camera is not the only thing Project Eagle will use of the mobile phone´s native features. Also the microphone to recognize songs that can also be purchased through  stores  with this type of content. 

Among all social networks that really have a certain critical mass, the one that better aligns with the interests of the marketplace is Snapchat for some key reasons. 

First, due to a basic matter of strategy. Facebook and Instagram not only are beyond the reach of virtually anyone. Moreover, they are direct competitors within the advertising market which Amazon is so strongly beginning to bet on. Twitter is public, it has always had serious problems to monetize and their formats are not disruptive enough. Who is left then? Pinterest or Snapchat? Perhaps this graph by Statista helps better understand the situation: 

255 million unique users seem to be a good fishing ground to begin to make these practices. It represents a sufficient volume to justify the investment in technology. 

But be careful, as, taking into account that their most profitable market are the United States and that the device that most interests them is mobile (as well as all the giants of the Internet right now), this other graph that shows what the most used Apps in USA are. It is even more revealing with regard to its strategy: 

Indeed, it has a number of monthly users that, on average, is higher than Whatsapp itself. 

In addition to these criteria of segmentation and volume (do not forget that this was a network that was all the rage among the younger population) then we have “two of a kind”.

On the one hand, Snapchat has too many problems when monetizing its platform but the truth is that,if you are a brand you can use Snapchat in different ways, including advertising. 

At the same time, we find that it may be the social network that seeks more disruption through technology: it invented its own formats when it seemed that you could just replicate the same (formats like Stories that Instagram copied which are reasons for much joy for Facebook). 

From the beginning Snapchat bet, not only on a network that is conceptually very different, but it also introduced the augmented reality through its filters. Also it has been trying for long to find the way to apply the search by images. 

Here comes the perfect fit.  Recently we told you about marketplaces applications and how they used the native functionality of phones to improve the user experience. Among them there was one identical to this Project Eagle: using artificial intelligence, Amazon App is able to understand and recognize the image captured by the camera and return a result within its catalogue. 

Actually, the answer is simple: it is true that Amazon has the necessary technology and is even already present in its App for smartphones, but if it really wants to make search through images popular it has to look for other channels. 

It is clear that it cannot find any kind of Alliance with Google(which would be ideal in search), since they are not doing well at the moment. In fact, the search engine considers Amazon to be a direct rival due to the amount of transactional traffic of that is capturing and also because how it is growing the use of its advertising platform by brands and vendors. 

Snapchat will provide Amazon with sufficient critical mass as to generate, at least potentially, a considerable number of transactions and, what is more interesting, it does so from a model based on affiliate marketing. Therefore, it will only have to pay depending on what they are able to sell to their users from the social network.