#AmazonCart By the Numbers: Growing Pains and Potential

Online retailers are constantly experimenting and iterating on connecting social media campaigns with more sales, and this is certainly true of Amazon.com's efforts with its automated add-to-cart hashtag, #AmazonCart. With the tagline "Add it Now, Buy it Later," Amazon has implemented a process whereby users who link their Twitter ID to their Amazon account can add products to their shopping cart from within Twitter simply by replying to any tweet including an Amazon link with the hashtag #AmazonCart. Amazon touts this as a convenient way for users to capture items seen while browsing Twitter for future reference. Retailers are supporting the effort by tweeting instructions and opportunities to use the hashtag from their own brand accounts.

My company, Iterate Studio, has been closely monitoring Amazon's test-and-learn methodology as it optimizes its support of #AmazonCart. On behalf of our retail clients, and with help from the social media tracking company CoverCake (one of our portfolio companies), we're able to present extensive data on the numbers #AmazonCart has produced thus far, and zero in on which of Amazon's efforts to support the hashtag have seen the most success. With the launch of #AmazonCart a little more than two months old, the following data from a recent 30-day period tells an initial story of the campaign's success.

#AmazonCart Data for 5/15/14-6/15/14:

• Number of #AmazonCart retweets: 87,605. This is a combination of all sources — Amazon, partners and users. This number is large enough to interpret as significant activity and interest.
• Products Twitter users have added to carts via the hashtag: 3,093. For all the activity on the hashtag, this number — the one that matters most to Amazon and its partners — is lower than might be expected (if only for now).
• Users who have added products to carts via the hashtag: 2,464.
• Average products added to cart per shopper: 1.25.
• Gender breakdown of #AmazonCart tweets: 54 percent male, 46 percent female.
• Percentage of English-language #AmazonCart tweets: 95.39 percent.
• Breakdown by platform: Looking at the platforms used for cart adds, the web holds a slight majority of users, but mobile adoption is high.

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.