#AmazonCart By the Numbers: Growing Pains and Potential

What Does it All Mean?
So what meaning should we take from this data at this time? While there's been some substantial traction on sharing #AmazonCart tweets, actual cart adds is still very low — though this is something I expect to increase as users learn the process. Perhaps most important to the long-term success of the hashtag is the fact that brands selling on Amazon have begun using #AmazonCart to push products to their followers.

Since followers of a brand presumably already have market knowledge of the products the brand sells, this could be where #AmazonCart sees the greatest conversions, not through Amazon's own promotions. Creating an "active hashtag" is typical of Amazon's willingness (and ability) to use new technology strategies to make shopping easier and easier. More than ever, other retailers will need to quickly leverage the myriad of e-commerce startup technology options available, and that's no easy task when competing with Amazon's massive R&D output.

Most Popular #AmazonCart Products
By sampling the latest 66 products promoted with the #AmazonCart hashtag on Amazon's Twitter account, I've learned that the most popular products are easy purchases that don't require market research from the shopper. These include daily necessities like Kleenex, low-cost tech items like the SanDisk 32GB Micro SD card, and pre-orders with built-in audiences like Halo 5 for Xbox.

Case Study No. 1: A/B Testing
Amazon tested two tweets linking to a SanDisk memory card with an #AmazonCart call to action, one with a simple product image, the other with an image explaining how to use the hashtag. The product image tweet triggered 60 cart adds; the second image generated 180. Certainly this test provided Amazon with useful data on user education and where they are given the concept of add to cart via Twitter is still in its infancy.

Case Study No. 2: Cross-Promotion
Kleenex included the #AmazonCart hashtag in a tweet from its brand account around the same time as Amazon tweeted the same promotion from its account. This joint promotion led to 244 users adding Kleenex Ultra Soft tissues to their carts.

I believe Amazon views this hashtag effort as a customer acquisition opportunity for itself and its retailer/brand network. This Kleenex case study seems to point heavily in that direction.

Social media is a new frontier, and Amazon is going about the work of studying and optimizing for its social audience. Amazon hasn't fully leveraged all of Twitter's capabilities yet (e.g., specialized Twitter cards for products), but it's surely thinking about it. Even though initial uptake seems to be slow, the social frontier holds strong promise. Amazon is in a great place to experiment, learn new insights, and leverage those learnings to iterate and refine its efforts in this channel.

Brian Sathiananthan is a founding partner at Iterate Studio, a digital proof-of-concept lab that discovers and curates emerging technologies for online retailers.