Amazon Inspire

~ the eulogy ~

for about two years every big app grew a vertical video feed, a copy of TikTok bolted onto whatever the app already did. Instagram and YouTube grew one, and so, eventually, did the shopping apps. Amazon's was called Inspire, a scroll of shoppable clips tucked inside the shopping app. i never saw it, anyway. it was a US-only feature, and it was gone before it would have reached anywhere else.

Amazon turned it on in December 2022 and opened it to everyone in the States by May 2023. the idea was straightforward and very of-its-moment. you swiped up through a feed of photos and short videos, posted by brands and by the creators in Amazon's influencer program, and anything you liked you could buy without leaving the screen. TikTok had proved people would shop out of a video feed. Amazon, which already owned the buy button, figured it could skip the middle step and host the feed itself.

it did not take. the creators are the whole engine of a feed like that, and they never really showed up, partly because the money was thin, a reported twenty-five dollars or so for a qualifying video. more or less, without the creators there was nothing to scroll, and without the scroll there was no reason to open it. a TikTok clone with nobody making the clips is just an empty room with a buy button.

~ the dossier ~

~ what really happened ~

the end was as quiet as these always are. on the 18th of February 2025 Amazon simply took Inspire out of the app, a little over two years after switching it on. if you went looking for the tab, you got a short message saying Inspire was no longer available and suggesting you talk to Rufus, the shopping assistant, instead. Amazon's public line was the usual one, they regularly look at features and this one no longer fit. no ceremony, just a tab that stopped being there one morning.

~ what it became ~

the interesting part is what Amazon did instead. rather than build and own the feed, it leaned into two other things, a shopping assistant driven by AI called Rufus, and deals to sell straight out of other companies' feeds, the buy buttons turning up inside Instagram and Snapchat. the lesson Amazon seemed to take was that it did not need to be the place you scroll, it only needed to be the checkout at the end of the scroll. Inspire was the last time Amazon tried to be the feed itself. it lost that, and decided it would rather be the register.

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