Amazon Quietly Launched A Tool That’s Basically A Dating App For Shopping

In case you needed another way to spend all your money on Amazon, the company is now testing a new tool to make it easier to find things you didn't know you needed. According to Vox, Amazon Scout will help you find new products to buy based on your likes and dislikes. With just a thumbs up or thumbs down on product pictures, Amazon Scout uses machine learning to show you other products based on your choices, CNBC reports. That means if you’re looking for, say, a coffee table, says CNBC, and you give a thumbs up to a reddish wooden rectangular table but a thumbs down to a circular table, you might be a shown a weathered gray table that looks more like the one you liked. According to CNBC, Amazon Scout is currently available for home furniture, kitchen and dining, women’s shoes, home décor, patio furniture, lighting, and bedding, but more categories will be added soon, such as clothing, handbags, and toys.

"This is a new way to shop, allowing customers to browse millions of items and quickly refine the selection based solely on visual attributes," an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement to CNBC. "Amazon uses imagery from across its robust selection to extract thousands of visual attributes for showing customers a variety of items so they can select their preferences as they go."

Amazon has cornered the market on need-based shopping, with 75 percent of Americans heading to Amazon to purchase daily needs like toilet paper, diapers, books, cleaning, supplies, and toothpaste, Vox reports. But because of Amazon’s “messy and cluttered” user experience, it’s never been a place people go to discover items they might want like they do on sites like Pinterest or Instagram. According to TechCrunch, Amazon users are often stuck scrolling through endless lists of products that aren’t catered to their specific tastes, so they turn to sites like Pinterest for inspiration. Amazon Scout, says TechCrunch, aims to solve that problem by creating a more browsable approach to shopping. An Amazon spokesperson told Vox that Amazon Scout is “perfect for shoppers who face two common dilemmas: ‘I don’t know what I want, but I’ll know it when I see it’ and ‘I know what I want, but I don’t know what it’s called.’”

Amazon hasn’t publicly announced Scout yet, CNBC reports, but the service is live under select categories and at amazon.com/scout. According to CNBC, you’ll see “SCOUT | Style explorer” under select categories, which will take you directly to the Scout site. If you’re on a general Amazon page, says CNBC, the link for Amazon Scout will be in the bar at the top right in between “Shop by Room and “Shop by Style.” According to CNBC, once you get to the Amazon Scout site, you can actually do more than just like and dislike products; you can also filter them by Prime eligibility, customer rating, and price. Ultimately, an Amazon spokesperson told CNBC, Amazon is trying to "free people from the need to use words to describe what they're looking for when shopping in highly visual categories.”

If you're already shouting TAKE ALL MY MONEY at Amazon on the daily, this new feature probably won't change that — but it will make it easier to find things you'll like. Like and dislike responsibly.