#AmazonCart

Amazon in 2014 Q1

Responsibilities: UX + Visual design

Overview

#amazoncart transforms Twitter into a shopping platform where authors, brands, artists, or anyone can market a product and direct their followers to take an action to drive sales. For shoppers, it allows them to add any Amazon products to their carts without leaving Twitter. They can complete checkout at their convenience whenever they next shop on Amazon.

Note: The video embedded in this page is a version made for Amazon India. As #amazoncart in US was deprecated, the original promotional video was no longer available.

User flow

Designs

Bridge the gap between Twitter and Amazon in the customer journey

Customer’s action on Twitter results in a cart-add on Amazon. To help customers feel confident in their actions, we focused on providing timely feedback via multiple communication channels including Twitter @mention from @MyAmazon and email notifications from Amazon.

**[Reply by @MyAmazon - Added to your cart]**

**[Email notification - Added to your cart]**

Facilitate learning:

We introduced a new way to shop and it was important that we made it easy for customers to try it out. In addition to creating a promotional video and a dedicated web page with FAQs, I designed a Twitter profile page for @MyAmazon account where customers can see instructions and try #AmazonCart with a pinned Tweet.

Drive awareness:

In addition to tweeting instructions from Amazon branded handles (e.g., @Amazon, @AmazonDeals), we sent out emails to targeted customers, encouraging them to try it out. For this email campaign, we targeted customers who were already connected their Twitter accounts with Amazon in the past thus had a high likelihood of being an active user on Twitter. Also, we utilized the existing share widget on product detail pages by updating the default text to include 'reply w/#AmazonCart to get it'. Since this Tweet includes Amazon product URL, customers who saw the Tweet could directly reply and experience the product.

Results & next steps

We gained recognition by press for this experiment and saw the steady usage increase at the beginning. In an effort to serve more customers, we added another hashtag for customers to use, #AmazonWishlist. However, despite the feature improvements, the product didn’t catch enough flywheel and was deprecated in US market early 2015.

I believe there were two things that could help this product succeed. Firstly, we could have launched with #AmazonWishlist as it better supports the customer intent, which is to browse and discover information. Customers on Twitter are not yet on the mindset of shopping and an "Add to Cart" action might have perceived as a high commitment they weren't ready to make. Secondly, we needed to make this product more discoverable. A tighter integration with Twitter platform (e.g., surfacing an "add to cart"action with other Twitter actions) would have helped Twitter users easily find our shopping actions. Or broadening a set of Tweets that customers can use #AmazonCart could have driven more customers to try out the feature and potentially helped catching a flywheel.