Amazon quietly shut down its Posts program this week, citing a drop in impressions and planned changes to its site design.
The ecommerce giant announced the deprecation of the program on June 3 as an update in its advertising advanced tools center.
Posts feature lifestyle photos and videos, similar to a social feed on Amazon’s site and app, and are meant to inspire browsing. Posts are free for brands to create, but brands can pay to “boost” a Post and run it as a Sponsored Brands ad that appears in search results.
“With declining impressions and the upcoming redesign of our Search and Detail pages, the Posts program has become less valuable,” the update said. “We encourage customers to explore our suite of sponsored advertising solutions as we continue to build and experiment with new creative formats.”
The Posts API is no longer available to new users, the update said. The ability to make new Posts will be discontinued after June 16, and the program will be shut down completely on July 31. Amazon did not immediately respond to ADWEEK’s request for comment for additional comment beyond the notice.
The change follows the February demise of another Amazon feature, Inspire, which mimicked TikTok’s video feed. Amazon’s scrapped efforts to become a social-style browsing platform come as its AI investment grows and agents reshape the ecommerce marketing world.
Amazon’s missed potential
For Podean, an agency that helps clients navigate ecommerce marketplaces including Amazon, the Posts program never lived up to Amazon’s promises.
“Posts lived in perpetual beta for years, never gaining meaningful traction because it tried to solve a problem that didn’t exist—making Amazon shoppers behave like social media users when they came to the platform with purchase intent, not to browse content feeds,” said Emily Browning, director of ecommerce content and creative at Podean.
Sunsetting the program “reflects both the feature’s fundamental misalignment with shopper behavior and the platform’s strategic maturation,” she continued.