Last week, Amazon quietly announced that it will deprecate its “Posts” program this month. The free, social-style tool used by brands to share lifestyle imagery and product stories directly within the platform will be no more! The program originally touted its ability to help brands drive product discovery and engagement across consumers’ purchase journeys on Amazon, showing up in organic shopping feeds and boosting content to Sponsored Brand Ads. But the writing has been on the wall for a while: engagement dwindled, measurement was tricky, and perhaps—most critically—users weren’t interacting with Posts the way brands had hoped.
Past and future swirl together in this singular sentence as Amazon acknowledged what sellers have pointed out on Reddit and in Seller Forums for years: Posts are losing steam. Amazon underscored the hard truth that this program had lost allure, while looking ahead to the promise of a broader site redesign, withholding additional details on what or when those changes might be, of course.
But this is where Amazon subtly steers brands toward their “pay-to-play” model, framing paid ads as new creative opportunities:
“We encourage customers to explore our suite of sponsored advertising solutions as we continue to build and experiment with new creative formats”. - Amazon
Posts join a growing list of sunset programs (remember Amazon Inspire?) that aimed to make Amazon feel more like a discovery platform but ultimately couldn’t overcome the platform’s buy-now DNA. This shift reflects Amazon’s broader pivot away from organic brand storytelling and toward paid, algorithm-driven formats, likely underpinned by rising AI capabilities. There is notable disappointment from many brands—yet another cost-free option is disappearing from the platform—but this deprecation is not surprising. Posts weren't widely adopted by shoppers, and the program wasn't expanded outside of the US—two flashing signs that Posts weren't here to stay.
So, what should brands do now? There are three key dates to keep in mind:
- June 3: API access was discontinued, and request access cut off for new users
- June 16: Post creation disabled
- July 31: Program completely shuts down
As we collectively prepare for life post-Posts, we have a few recommendations for how best to face this change:
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Harvest existing Posts before June 16, saving images, captions and performance details before they vanish.
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Rethink your brand’s creative ad strategies. Sponsored Brands and DSP remain key levers for brand storytelling, just with better tracking and reach.
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Lean into Brand Store & PDP content to breathe more life into your brand’s visual storytelling.
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Stay alert for new features. Amazon hinted at a "site redesign" but offered no additional details. Something new may be around the corner—you can bet we'll be watching for what's next!
While Posts was never a perfect fit for retail browsing behavior, the deprecation of this program casts a shadow over the paling landscape of "free-to-use" tools in the world of brand storytelling. As the platform gets more sophisticated (and more expensive), brands will need to stay nimble. Long-term strategies demand pivots to strategic paid ads, optimized Brand Stores, and quick adoption of PDP enhancements. The epoch of “organic” brand presence on Amazon may be fading, so we’ll look for new ways to anchor today’s visual assets within tomorrow’s strategy and keep a watchful eye on the horizon of creative innovation at Amazon.
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