‘Amazon Moments’ Lets Devs Gift Users With Tangible Rewards

Amazon's Moments Lets Devs Gift Physical Rewards

Amazon has launched a service called Moments, to let developers create actions for customers and give them rewards for completing them, according to reports.

The actions vary: They could include watching some episodes of a show if it’s a service like Netflix, or if it’s The Washington Post (which was part of the service’s pilot program), it could mean receiving an Echo Dot with a subscription.

The cross-platform marketing tool goes live today (Feb. 14) in 100 countries, the company said.

“Moments lets you increase engagement by offering tailored rewards delivered by Amazon when customers reach actions that matter in your apps and websites,” the company said. “When using Moments, apps across industries have seen improvements in engagement — in gaming, one developer increased their percentage of first-time payers by 20x. A streaming video service offered $10 worth of physical rewards and doubled the likelihood of winning back a subscriber.”

Amazon said it has “millions” of products to offer as incentives.

“This adds to the variety and lets developers do something they haven’t been able to do before,” said Amir Kabbara, Amazon’s head of Moments.

The pilot program has been very successful, Kabbara said. It has been run with TikTok, Sony Crackle, USA Today and Bell Canada, among others. Amazon said customers are twice as likely to complete an action versus virtually testing an item.

The move is attractive to companies because they don’t have the infrastructure to fulfill the gifts, and Amazon is uniquely positioned to help with that aspect. For Amazon, it gives the company more opportunity to sell items from its marketplace. It also gets the company two revenue streams, both as the marketplace operator and as the exchange itself.

Developers can get Moments through an API that they can put on a website or build into an app. They can also separate and categorize customers by type.

“If keeping an active payer engaged is worth $50, you can set a high-value action and offer $40 headphone sets with a comfortable margin of error,” Amazon said. “In addition, customer targeting allows you to tailor rewards to the lifetime value of each user segment. You could offer a $5 reward to new users, a $25 reward to active payers and a $200 reward to top spenders.”