Amazon Launches Short Video Posts Feature, Encouraging Merchants to Exploit New Traffic Acquisition Skills

Recently, Amazon's global shop brand promotion tool, Posts, officially launched the short video feature. Merchants can post short videos in the Posts, with a length of up to 60 seconds and a 9:16 aspect ratio (including a brief title, and the displayed products are fixed at the bottom of the screen). The feature is currently available on the US site, and merchants can use it without paying extra fees.

Posts serve as a brand's social account on Amazon, where merchants can post images, descriptive titles, and links to related product pages to promote their brand and products. These posts will appear in various places on the Amazon app, including the brand's feed, related product and category feeds, and the merchant's product list. According to official data, non-video posts brought advertisers over 14.4 billion impressions and 726 million interactions from April 2020 to July 2021.

With the addition of short video capabilities, merchants can tell their brand stories through multiple video posts to increase brand recall. The "watch & shop" feature in video posts is more in line with modern consumer shopping habits.

In addition, video posts have different functions than product detail page videos. Videos on product detail pages are centered around showcasing the product, while posts' videos can present richer content beyond the product itself. They can form serialized stories, engage emotionally with consumers, such as highlighting the brand's contribution to social causes, telling the founder's story, and presenting the research and development journey. These soft brand assets can help merchants establish a more three-dimensional, consumer-friendly brand image.

Official data shows that on the Amazon store, brand product sales can increase by 22.5% after posting video posts. Brands that post 10 or more posts can bring 2.5 times more traffic to their stores. Users who watch videos are 3.6 times more likely to be converted than those who do not. This implies that the launch of video posts is a great opportunity for merchants to enhance traffic acquisition and conversion rates.

According to reports, to post video posts, merchants can follow a process similar to that of posting image posts. They can create video posts through the publishing generator in the ad console, and tag up to five products shown in the video. The posted video posts will appear in the "Product Detail Page," "Inspire" (for inspiration), "Search," and "Follow" timelines on the mobile store and mobile website. They will also appear in the brand flagships of the mobile store and mobile website and in category feeds, style feeds, and brand information flows on desktop devices, visible to users.

It's worth noting that just as Amazon launched the video post feature, another astonishing development has emerged: OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research company, has released the Sora video generation model, which can generate a coherent 60-second video from prompts. This model not only accurately presents details but also understands the presence of objects in the physical world and generates characters with rich emotions.

Many cross-border merchants have sensed an opportunity in this: By using Sora to produce product videos, they may achieve significant cost reduction and efficiency enhancement in operations. Taking Amazon's latest addition of the short video post feature as an example, with Sora's content productivity assistance, merchants may be able to better utilize the post feature and open up new traffic sources.