Dive Brief:
- Amazon is expanding its content offerings, tapping a variety of experts to help shoppers learn more about products sold on the site through blog posts and listicles.
- The experts include personalities such as home improvement authority Bob Vila, floral designer Lila B. Design, décor writer Erin Gates, and photography resource Contrastly.
- Announced in April, the program appears to still be in beta testing, in spite of Amazon tapping additional expert bloggers and curators to post articles.
Dive Insight:
Amazon appears to be developing content around its product offerings, offering articles designed to help consumers explore their options in the kitchen, home, books, furniture, pet products, and other categories. The e-commerce giant has tapped a number of experts to pen articles, often concentrating on themed lists of recommended products such as the recent “Bob Vila’s Top 10 Artificial Christmas Trees.”
Amazon appears to be struggling with how best to integrate Expert Articles into everyday shopping. The content is difficult to discover unless a browser knows where to look; even a keyword search doesn’t always deliver an appropriate shopping guide. Contributors are not paid except with exposure from the online retailer, but few have realized additional recognition or traffic to their sites so far.
As for the presentation, Expert Articles look similar to the curated selections appearing on Launchpad, Amazon’s small-business market hub, and are far less cluttered than Amazon’s typical product page. The expanded content could eventually be used for retargeting, or left as native content that expands upon Amazon’s expertise in retail sales.
Content and commerce go hand-in-hand in the omnichannel environment, with Google algorithms crawling the web for the latest information and consumers eager to punch it up on their smartphones. Amazon’s nascent native content is lost in the vastness of its marketplace so far, but could eventually provide shoppers with resources and suggestions beyond the usual "featured recommendations" at the bottom of the page.
