Amazon Explore Debuts Virtual Tours, Shopping Experiences

Amazon is launching a new feature called Amazon Explore for virtual tours of real places one can take without leaving the house, according to a post on the company’s website.

The eCommerce giant said in the post that Amazon Explore works by connecting a user one-on-one with a host, allowing the host to take the user on a virtual tour of a place. The user doesn’t have to be on camera. The tours include categories like cultural landmarks, learning and creativity for things like cooking or tie-dyeing, and shopping at boutique markets and other places.

Most of the sessions are between 30 and 60 minutes, and users are instructed to pick a period of day when they have the most time to sit down and take the tour. They can log in through their Amazon accounts. Users can snap photos during their sessions by clicking the camera icon on their screens.

The hosts are a wide range of people, including guides, teachers and personal shoppers, the post stated.

And users can buy items they find on the tour as they would in person. The way that works, Amazon said in the post, is that one can buy things available on the street where their tour guide is, or in shops nearby. The host agrees to ship said items after the session is over, although some things like food can’t be bought this way.

Digitized experiences are on the rise, and PYMNTS reported that this is likely to become more prominent as the holidays roll around — Halloween events, Black Friday and even Santa Claus have planned digital versions coming.

Halloween will be kept safe through new drive-thru haunted houses, aimed to help people have fun without the usual close contact and clustering of in-person events. And for Christmas, people might see a rise in buying physical items as gifts, as opposed to experiences like trips or concerts.