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Snap Visual Search — Search for products and buy from Amazon via Snap's camera
Snap Visual Search let's you point your Snapchat camera at a physical product or barcode, and press and hold on the camera screen to get started.
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@rrhoover Surprising to me, but Lens actually found some amount of traction: 600 million visual searches were made Lens every month (late 2017). 😮
@nickabouzeid sounds like that's a report of searches made on Pinterest as a whole, not just with Pinterest Lens:
"People now do more than 600 million visual searches every month across Lens, our browser extension and the visual search tool inside Pins." (source)
@nickabouzeid @rrhoover hi guys, old discussion but Pinterest and SnapChat are back on top of those topics (with recent PR), and since yesterday we are on PH. Would love to get your feedback on @byBr. Snap Assistant
a month ago i wrote about why snapchat needs this feature amongst others to survive, and today they launched it! a bit of road map premonition. Excited for this evolution as a strong snapchat believer. articles here if you want a read: https://uxdesign.cc/how-to-save-...
Interesting (though not surprising) that they chose to integrate with Amazon instead of the native retailer source, like on Instagram. Unless that’s coming later.
A step towards using the Snap camera as a tool instead of just a way to communicate. Plus Snap is prob getting some type of cut from sales. I like the move. Next step is prob identifying products that are already in the photos/videos and doing a bit of what Instagram is doing with their eCommerce features.
I love cool tech, and this is admittedly cool tech. But it's an utterly stupid product move.
Being a 17 year old Product Manager + Developer, I'd like to think that I know a lot about what young people want from apps, especially social media apps like Snapchat - but I also understand the needs of businesses. My issue with this is that although it meets business needs, it does not meet the needs of Snap's biggest user base - young people like myself.
Young people want to make money, not spend money. That's because we don't have a lot of it - most young people either spend from the small amount of pocket money they get from their parents, or the crappy part-time wages they get at their job. So, we don't like being tricked into or encouraged to spend the little money we have - no matter if you're a tiny company or a massive corporation.
This product is trying to get young people to spend money. That's not meeting consumer needs - and if they continue with moves like this, they will lose consumers, and ultimately lose business.
In my opinion, social media platforms like Snapchat should be trying to address this issue in a way that meets consumer and business needs. Some great examples of companies doing this include UNiDAYS (one of the most popular apps amongst my friends), O2 Priority (many of my friends have O2 contracts just for this app so that they can skip the queue at concerts), and Wuntu (Hutchison 3G's version of this app). In these examples, users get free stuff, retailers get more brand awareness + can influence consumer behaviour towards buying their product, and the platform/app hosting this service makes money.
It's logic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(Sidenote: It would have been better for Snapchat to put the resources they used making this into reworking their 'Discover' functionality, which is a hot mess right now. Just throwing it out there)
@lucas_johnston I agree that it could be a problem for those in high school and younger but for those in college/recent grads, which usually have a little more money, I could see it working nicely. What I'm interested in is the use-case. If I want something, it's usually because I searched for it online, not because I saw it in the wild. Testing it out right now and it seems more like a cool trick than something I'd use to buy stuff. Only the future will tell I guess.
@lucasjohnston Teens tell parents what to buy sometimes, and their purchasing power is actually relatively high: https://www.inc.com/issie-lapows...
@duarteosrm True, but this product is targeted at customers seeing something and trying to buy it straight away from Amazon. If I was keen enough on a product that I wanted my parent to buy it, I'd do some research to try and convince my parents. Again, this product doesn't meet the demands of young people, Snap's largest audience.
@mohamud94 I agree - it may well be more useful for those of an older generation. But in that case, Snapchat should be targeting that generation (and should have been from the start). In reality, they've spent millions on targeting young people and have had a degree of success. Moves like this just take the platform another step back.
@lucasjohnston I see your point that teenagers might not have the ability to carry out what this feature is intended to do on their own, however, I'm willing to bet the average teenager would quite enjoy just taking a picture of something, seeing what it is on amazon, and telling their parents to buy it with just a click of a button. Parents that trust their children with purchasing decisions might even give them an amazon account, which would be great for amazon to get early customer loyalty. It might be used as a discovery and brand loyalty tool more than as a direct sales tool.
I would see this not working if teenage purchasing power was low, but as you can see it's actually quite high so I believe there are multiple use cases.
Snapchat creator program that awards some affiliate cut to influencers seem like a natural expansion path. It would incentivize influencers to actively use Snapchat.
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