'60 percent shoppers influenced by creators', says Amazon's Zahid Khan

Amazon.in has launched a platform to empower content creators, Creator Central in India.

As per the company, Creator Central streamlines the content creation process, offering intuitive workflows and a dedicated storefront to enable creators to focus on their creative vision rather than technical complexities.

With the newly launched platform, content creators can produce and promote their content on Amazon.in, reaching a vast audience while optimizing their performance via automated product recommendations, performance reports as well as educational resources.

The company expects that Creator Central will be rolled out to over 50,000 creators associated with Amazon Influencer Program over the next few weeks.

It will help creators to create content like idea lists, photos, videos and directly upload it on their personalized storefronts from Amazon app. They can also view their performance reports like total earnings, top promoted products and categories at a glance, along with details of deals and availability for them.

"Creator Central is a one-stop platform designed to empower Indian content creators. We're giving creators the tools they need to create content while simplifying the process from creation to promotion and optimization. With a dedicated storefront, comprehensive analytics, product recommendations customized for creators’ audiences, Creator Central offers everything creators need to succeed on Amazon.in," Zahid Khan, Director of Shopping Initiatives for India and Emerging Markets, Amazon, told Storyboard18.

Edited excerpts:

Q. How does Amazon differentiate itself from the other players in the social commerce space?

I don't want to do comparison but our USPs are unparallel. Creator Central itself is an end-to-end experience that is unmatched as today there is no central space for creators. Over the course of last couple of years, the program that we offer for creators specially with the education point of view, say Fashion Influencer Program, are another reason for our progression in this space. We work directly with creators and have self-service content for longer tail of creators. Lastly, the accuracy of information specially report which we put out and regularity of our payments is the big differentiator.

Q. What challenges influencers face while maintaining reach? How does Amazon's Creator Central help address these problems?

Through Creator Central, a creator can transparently see what's working and it also throw recommendations based on the creator's area of interest. The other method is when creators are shortlisted for whom we promote the content within Amazon be it exclusive content on amazon Live or non-exclusive content, we figure out ways to optimize the content.

Q. What role do influencers and content creators will play in shaping the future of e-commerce in India?

If brand and creators win, then Amazon wins. Beyond this, the core reason why creators and influencers are important for Amazon and customers is that social media influencers are playing a pivotal role in shaping online behavior specially when there are new ecommerce shoppers. Secondly, their authenticity can significantly influence consumers' purchasing decision.

Q. How do you foresee the growth of social commerce market in India impacting e-commerce in upcoming years?

With years of experience what I have spotted is creators, brands and e-commerce platforms will grow together. Looking at from e-commerce perspective, while the space is growing very fast in India, it still is at a nascent stage. We see influencer born almost every other day across different languages, dialects. So, it's just a start. I feel like the fact that it is very nascent, means it can do exciting tests.

For instance, if there is a new brand that wants to come out, traditionally what is to be done is invest in traditional media which is mostly untargeted, but now they have this additional channel. If we continue to retain trust, both on the creator and consumer side, it will build a win-win situation for brands, creators and for Amazon as well.

Q. What's your take on the content creators or influencers violating the advertising norms? Do you think brands and ASCI should take some stricter actions with the rise of nano influencers?

I think it is a collective industry responsibility to make sure that they very transparently share information specially with the creators who have got certain threshold of followers. It is our responsibility to ensure that we nudge those creators to read and watch the content we have made, which is very easy to understand. The question is also how do I educate these content creators with the evolving guidelines, how to keep them updated continuously. So, that's the point where Amazon has to play a key role.

We have proactive and reactive measures, we make sure to take care of exclusive brand and creator partnership. In case if there is a brand complaint, we address it very quickly.

Q. By what percent the creator economy is going to expand in the upcoming years? What kinds of brands are getting higher traction with influencers?

If you look at the trends, 60 percent of current ecommerce shoppers are influenced by some or the other creator's content. As the ecommerce space grows, the creator economy will grow accordingly. It is more important to understand where that internet penetration is happening, it is happening now more and more at lower tier cities. When you look at lower tier, there is more diversity there in terms of language, culture, buying preferences and so on. We see a lot of creators mushrooming in these areas because they have trust and they speak the local dialect. For this, the space will grow very fact but quoting a number would be difficult. What we at Amazon can do is to provide these creators a seamless experience and education on how they can be successful and monetized.

When we started in investing this space a couple of years back, we saw that traction for high consideration products, these are typically expensive product, such as Washing Machines, TVs, Mobile Phones, among others. However, in the last 12 months, most of the traction are coming to categories like beauty and fashion. It has happened through a combination of testing along three dimensions, that is rise of micro influencers, price point and creative format. It doesn't matter whether it is a celebrity creator or what you call as micro or nano creator, what matters more is how much key online expert that creator is in that domain and secondly are they trained to sell.