See, snap, Amazon Fashion sale. In a rare partnership for Amazon, the commerce giant will help Snapchat challenge Instagram and Pinterest for social shopping supremacy. Users can use Snapchat’s camera to scan a physical object or barcode, which brings up a card showing that item and similar ones along with their title, price, thumbnail image, average review score and Prime availability. When they tap on one, they’ll be sent to Amazon’s app or site to buy it. Snapchat determines if you’re scanning a song, QR Snapcode or object, and then Amazon’s machine vision tech recognizes logos, artwork, package covers or other unique identifying marks to find the product. It’s rolling out to a small percentage of U.S. Snap considers other countries. Snap refused to disclose any financial terms of the partnership. It could be earning a referral fee for each thing you buy from Amazon, or it could just be doing the legwork for free in exchange for added utility. Po st has been generated with G SA Conte nt Gener ator Demoversion.
A Snapchat spokesperson tells me the latter is the motivation (without ruling out the former), as Snapchat wants its camera to become the new cursor - your point of interface between the real and Amazon Fashion digital worlds. Social commerce is heating up as Instagram launches Shopping tags in Stories and a dedicated Shopping channel in Explore, while Pinterest opens up Shop the Look pins and hits 250 million monthly users. The feature should mesh well with Snap’s young and culture-obsessed audience. In the U.S., its users are 20 percent more likely to have made a mobile purchase than non-users, and 60 percent more likely to make impulse purchases according to studies by Murphy Research and GfK. The feature functions similarly to Pinterest’s Lens visual search tool. In the video demo above, you can see Snapchat identifying Under Armour’s HOVR shoe (amongst all its other models), and the barcode for CoverGirl’s clean matte liquid makeup. That matches our scoop based on code dug out of Snapchat’s Android app by TechCrunch tipster Ishan Agarwal.
Snapchat’s shares popped three percent the day we published that scoop, and again this morning before falling back to half that gain. The feature could prove useful for when you don’t know the name of the product you’re looking at, as with shoes. That could turn visual search into a new form of word-of-mouth marketing where every time an owner shows off a product, they’re effectively erecting a billboard for it. Eventually, visual search could help users shop across language barriers. Amazon is clearly warming up to social partnerships, recognizing its inadequacy in that department. Along with being named Snapchat’s official search partner, it’s also going to be bringing Alexa voice control to Facebook’s Portal video chat screen, which is reportedly debuting this week according to Cheddar’s Alex Heath. Snapchat could use the help. It’s now losing users and money, down from 191 million to 188 million daily active users last quarter while burning $353 million. Partnering instead of trying to build all its technology in-house could help reduce that financial loss, while added utility could aid with user growth. And if Snap can convince advertisers, they might pay to educate people on how to scan their products with Snapchat. Snap keeps saying it wants to be a "Camera Company," but it’s really an augmented reality software layer through which to see the world. The question will be whether it can change our behavior so that when we see something special, we interact with it through the camera, not just capture it.
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Common shares outstanding plus shares underlying stock-based awards totaled 517 million on June 30, 2020, compared with 510 million one year ago. "This was another highly unusual quarter, and I couldn’t be more proud of and grateful to our employees around the globe," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. "As expected, we spent over $4 billion on incremental COVID-19-related costs in the quarter to help keep employees safe and deliver products to customers in this time of high demand-purchasing personal protective equipment, increasing cleaning of our facilities, following new safety process paths, adding new backup family care benefits, and paying a special thank you bonus of over $500 million to front-line employees and delivery partners. We’ve created over 175,000 new jobs since March and are in the process of bringing 125,000 of these employees into regular, full-time positions. And third-party sales again grew faster this quarter than Amazon’s first-party sales.
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Amazon’s top priority is providing for the health and safety of our employees and partners, and the company spent more than $4 billion in the second quarter on incremental COVID-19 related initiatives to help keep employees safe, provide additional compensation to our employees and delivery partners, and deliver products to customers. Amazon provided a one-time Thank You bonus totaling over $500 million to all front-line employees and partners who were with the company throughout the month of June. This benefit provides employees with up to 10 days of company-subsidized emergency backup child or adult care. Amazon introduced Distance Assistant to help keep employees safe by providing them with live feedback on their social distancing via a 50-inch monitor. Amazon made the software and AI behind this innovation available via open source so that anyone can create their own Distance Assistant at no cost and get up and running with just a monitor, computer, and camera. Amazon is collaborating with national medical care group Crossover Health to pilot Amazon Neighborhood Health Centers, which are new medical facilities available to Amazon employees and their families.