Amazon expands its Interesting Finds online gift shop, which is now on mobile, and adds human curation
Following its debut earlier this year, Amazon quietly launched a revamped and expanded version of Pinterest-like feature called “Interesting Finds,” which is also now available on mobile.
Context & Ripple Effects
Interesting Finds is Amazon's second curated-discovery experiment of 2016, following a dedicated shop for Product Hunt-featured items in August — both attempts to import editorial taste into a catalog built on search. The mobile rollout matters because it puts the gift-browsing surface where holiday shoppers actually are.
The feature also becomes the durable survivor in a line of visual-shopping bets: Amazon launched Spark, its Prime-member shoppable feed, the next summer, then shut Spark down in 2019 and pointed its URL at #FoundItOnAmazon, explicitly described as similar to Interesting Finds.
First-order effects
- Holiday-season gift shoppers gain a browsable, human-curated alternative to keyword search across desktop and mobile, giving Amazon a Pinterest-style surface it previously lacked.
- Merchants whose products get picked up by Amazon's curators win placement in a discovery channel that doesn't depend on sponsored ads or organic search rank.
Second-order effects
- Pinterest, the explicit design reference for Interesting Finds, faces Amazon building shoppable curation natively into checkout rather than routing inspiration through an external app.
- The expansion normalizes a build-fast cadence of discovery surfaces at Amazon — Spark follows within months, then Inspire — each giving brands another content format to staff for.
Third-order effects
- Spark's shutdown shows the structural pattern: most of these feeds don't survive, and their traffic gets folded back into surviving surfaces like #FoundItOnAmazon and Interesting Finds.
- Human curation here is a waypoint, not an endpoint — by 2024 Amazon is generating recommendations with AI Shopping Guides, suggesting the curation layer migrates from editors to models once the browsing behavior is established.
The trend: Amazon iterates through short-lived social and visual discovery products while consolidating the survivors into its shopping funnel, gradually replacing human curation with algorithmic recommendation.