Home > News

Amazon Shuts Down Spark, the Service Intended to Compete with Instagram

By Laura Tucker
News Amazon Spark Featured

One of the largest spaces for competitiveness in tech is in the area of shopping. Amazon may have started out as a bookseller, but they’ve come to be known as THE place to go for buying nearly anything online. This leads everyone to want to compete with them.

But they want to encroach into everyone else’s spaces as well, so they launched Spark two years ago to sell things in an Instagram-type format to compete with Instagram’s sales. They have now shut down Spark but are replacing it with similar shopping tools.

Amazon Spark Shuts Down

Spark was an image and story feed that was marketed toward Amazon Prime members to “spark” their interest in other items to encourage more sales.

True to the Amazon brand, Spark was focused on shopping and making a sale, and that’s where it differed from Instagram. While Instagram can allow users to sell their wares via the service and even added a checkout option a few months ago, they also encourage the social aspect with follows, likes, etc., and that’s a space that Spark never entered.

Sure, Spark may have copied Instagram’s advertising look, but that was really as far as it went. Sellers didn’t pick up fans of their work and buyers weren’t able to follow sellers whose work they particularly enjoyed.

When you go to the prior URL for Spark, it now redirects you to the Found It on Amazon site. This service is similar to another Amazon shopping tool, Interesting Finds. This tool shows you a “My Mix” of products in different categories, encouraging you to “heart” what you like.

News Amazon Spark Redirect

Personally, I prefer the front page I get when I sign on to Amazon that shows deals in categories I have shopped in previously while also showing me all the products I’ve browsed before. This is always a more interesting mix to me, as it has not only what I’m personally shopping for but items I’ve been researching for Make Tech Easier

TechCrunch reports that the Found It on Amazon site will not incorporate what worked with Spark and Interesting Finds, yet Interesting Finds is not shutting down.

Shopping Evolution Continues

Perhaps a very large reason is the departure of Chee Chew, the Amazon VP of Consumer Engagement who left at the beginning of the year. He was a big part of Spark, and its success stalled even further after he left.

But this leads to the question of whether there will now be an empty space in online shopping without Spark. It also leads to the question of what Chew’s departure will mean to the overall success of Amazon.

Has Amazon stretched themselves too far? Should they have stuck to their own lane? Despite Spark never really catching on anyway, will their business be affected in some way? Will this bolster Instagram’s shopping choices?’Let us know what you think about this in the comments below.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.