Amazon Shop Brand Sites In the Wild - Turbo Selection Expansion
While Amazon's Shop Brand site is in testing, I was able to find it in the wild on my mobile app. Here's what I did:
Search for "iqbar". Scroll forever. It was very far down.
I get the sense this will be what we used to call "backfill" listings in comparison shopping search. In other words, any paid or higher priority marketplace or first-party item will go up higher but this could potentially add a lot of selection where Amazon is thin and give brands behavior data.
3 items appeared: a coffee mug, a mini sampler, and a blender.
Two of the items worked as intended. I clicked through, Amazon gave me a Terms of Service Pop-up, and it went to the page of the website that matched the price.
The mini sampler did not even bring me to a product page, it was kind of a broken page with no item on it. It's possible Amazon's feed or crawler was out of date.
What else did I learn?
The treatment of "Buy for Me" (AI assisted Buying) and Shop the brand site is the same on Amazon in terms of the box that it appears in. I haven't seen an AI assisted one live personally. For the AI assisted buying, Amazon will authorize your card not more than $10 above what Amazon quotes you before the AI bot goes off and do it, likely for credit card authorization purchases.
How will brands get their products up?
I haven't seen any news yet, but if it's like other shopping services, I expect sellers will send Amazon a feed to get their products there, ideally. That would give merchants control, and of course Amazon would likely accept a Google feed (like everyone does).
This type of data would also be useful for Amazon's AI. You could even imagine that Amazon get brand review data in a feed too potentially, or integrate with popular providers -- depending on how much leverage or interest there is.
