In a move that could potentially revive its waning usage, Snapchat (NYSE: SNAP) has partnered with Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) to let users buy and view products based on what they see through their smartphone's camera lenses.
The mechanism through which this would be implemented is that once a Snapchat user takes a picture of a physical product or barcode, the user is directed to an Amazon pop-up card for that product or something similar.
The shopping tool, which is only available to a small set of users in the US for now, could eventually present another source of revenue for the social media company, which has struggled with competing apps like the Facebook-owned Instagram (NASDAQ: FB). Snapchat made a less-than-desirable move by going public at $17 a share last year, and has posted disappointing revenue growth and user additions in some recent quarters. The company declined to comment on its financial relationship with Amazon.
The app has continuously tried to add functionality to its camera in efforts to stay relevant. Users can hold down a button to identify songs through Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) Shazam, load up augmented reality games, or play with face lenses. Though the financial details of the deal are not clear, if Amazon is giving Snap some money for every product sold, that might help the company generate much-needed cash. Snap's stock reached an all-time low earlier this month. Other apps allow users to shop like this already, but notably, Instagram doesn't do so yet.
Snapchat could also be earning a referral fee for each thing a person buys from Amazon, or it could just be doing the legwork for free in exchange for added utility. It is clear at least that Snapchat wants its camera to become the new cursor - a person's point of interface between the real and digital worlds.
The benefit of such a feature is that visual searches are popular with younger shoppers and will help keep Snapchatters from straying to competing commerce sites. The agreement could also help Amazon make its site easier to navigate. With hundreds of millions of products to sift through, using text search can be cumbersome when shoppers aren't sure precisely how to describe what they want. A photo is not only more seamless, but also more likely to be acted upon since it is memorable.
This feature is not novel. Pinterest Inc. has a similar tool, and online marketplace eBay's (NASDAQ: EBAY) smartphone app lets merchants point their cameras at their wares to auto-populate fields such as brand and product description, and even suggest prices and the best box size.