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Television

Amazon Is Launching Its Own Shark Tank Where Winners Get To Be Amazon Sellers (theverge.com) 20

Amazon Prime is launching a new Shark Tank-style competition show where contestants pitch products to a panel of celebrity investors and a live audience called "The 100." If a product wins audience approval, it gets featured in Amazon's Buy It Now Store, accessible via QR codes during episodes. The show, called Buy It Now and hosted by JB Smoove, premieres on October 30, 2024. You can watch a trailer for it on YouTube. The Verge reports: The company announced the show earlier this year but has now released a trailer showing what it will look like. Contestants pitch their ideas to the audience. If the crowd votes for them, then the panelists pick which ones will show up on Amazon's Buy It Now Store: a new storefront launching alongside the show that viewers can reach using a QR code that shows up during episodes. One presenter per episode will get a $20,000 prize, too.

Apart from Smoove -- who you may remember from Curb Your Enthusiasm and Harley -- the show will feature "a star-studded rotating panel of celebrity panelists," including Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Anderson, Tabitha Brown, Tony Hawk, and Christian Siriano. It will also include three Amazon executives, and Ring founder and current CEO of Door.com (formerly Latch) Jamie Siminoff will serve as the "resident judge and entrepreneurial panelist." Oh, and those panelists will be selling their own products on that Buy It Now Store.

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Amazon Is Launching Its Own Shark Tank Where Winners Get To Be Amazon Sellers

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  • Circle jerk (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BeaverCleaver ( 673164 ) on Monday September 30, 2024 @08:11PM (#64830041)

    the show will feature "a star-studded rotating panel of celebrity panelists," including Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Anderson, Tabitha Brown, Tony Hawk, and Christian Siriano. It will also include three Amazon executives, and Ring founder and current CEO of Door.com (formerly Latch) Jamie Siminoff will serve as the "resident judge and entrepreneurial panelist." Oh, and those panelists will be selling their own products on that Buy It Now Store.

    Sounds like a total circle jerk on many levels. Are real humans actually going to watch this? And are real people going to pitch their products on the show? It doesn't seem much of a "prize" to have your innovative product listed on a site that is renowned for ripping off independent sellers with Amazon-branded knockoffs of popular products.

    Sigh. The show will probably be wildly popular and spawn many seasons and several spinoff series.

    • The contest isn't real. It's a marketing scheme. It's like Survivor with an attached gift shop.

      Will people watch it? Why not, they watched Survivor. It really depends on the production quality. They have the personalities to make it, so now success depends on the writers.
    • It's QVC on streaming. With your credit card info and click-to-buy button. They'll print money.
    • They forgot to do the "thinly veiled" part again. People will ignore the fact that it's all fake to drive sales if you put just the thinnest veneer of reality on top. People will not watch on principle but would watch the exact same show by someone else if it wasn't directly on the surface.

    • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Inception performative entrepreneurship.

  • You suck and I want nothing to do with you. Now be gone.

  • by Hey_Jude_Jesus ( 3442653 ) on Monday September 30, 2024 @08:29PM (#64830073)
    Just open an account and then start selling.
  • by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Monday September 30, 2024 @09:54PM (#64830175) Journal

    So, you come up with a great idea and Amazon gives you a "prize" of allowing you to sell it on their service? The SAME service that allows millions of other people to sell their products? And what terms and conditions are tied to this prize? Not allowed to sell anyplace else, possibly? Or "Amazon only waives seller and listing fees for the first 6 months."?

    I tried to sell a few of my things on Amazon years ago and it was a miserable experience. They've gotten so focused on metrics and a "customer is always right" philosophy they demand sellers cling to, it makes it nearly impossible to do business without losing money to scammers and con artists.

    The only ones doing well selling there are moving large volumes of product they've gotten cheap enough to begin with so they don't even care if 50% of it is lost.
    The "little guy" is of no interest to them except as a buyer.

    • Moreover, the thing about Shark Tank was that you were getting an investor's buy-in to help you bring the product to market and manufacture it in a volume worth selling. What are the 100 going to do to enable any of that? Ideas are free, it's turning them into actual products that takes time and money.

  • Can't anyone sell something on Amazon? How is this an opportunity, except for Amazon?
  • by elcor ( 4519045 ) on Monday September 30, 2024 @10:56PM (#64830245)
    active who knows anyone selling on amazon knows it's hell
  • by SethJohnson ( 112166 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2024 @12:23AM (#64830337) Homepage Journal
    The competition angle is all a charade. These episodes are advertorial. The company has already selected the products to be promoted and is stuffing them into this fake competition narrative to hype them up. Additionally, Amazon will be tracking which episodes a person has viewed and then will clobber that consumer with follow-up ads through any Alexa or Fire TV devices.

    No surprise Paltrow is name-dropped here. She conned Netflix into streaming her series, Goop Labs, to promote her "wellness" brand- Goop. Paltrow also has advertorial experience with her blog where she has posted quack wellness products, even using a story about her mother stuffing jade eggs up her cooch that gave her a certain glow when walking in public. Goop later paid out $145,000 in a lawsuit [vogue.com] over the beneficial claims it made about the jade vagina eggs.
  • The Apprentice (Score:4, Insightful)

    by devslash0 ( 4203435 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2024 @06:05AM (#64830671)

    Jeff Bezos edition.

  • by zawarski ( 1381571 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2024 @07:39AM (#64830791)
    Than Rings of Power.
    • ooo you troll. Have sunlight.

      After Lenny Henry the hobbit, female dwarves without beards, some quite ungraceful elves and departures from a text that was not JRRT's best and I have given up trying to read. It's not sooo baaad as all that.

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