Twitch Announces Gear on Amazon, Allows Streamers to Sell Products

Published: September 15, 2017 9:32 PM /

By:


twitch-logo

Twitch was bought by Amazon three years ago and has largely been a separate entity, aside from the Amazon Prime benefits for Twitch. Today, Twitch has announced "Gear on Amazon," which allows streamers to list the "gear" they use like monitors or graphics cards to their audience to purchase from Amazon.

If you stream on Twitch, your viewers have probably asked you about your PC build, your preferred hardware, and your favorite snacks.
Gear on Amazon isn't limited to strictly "gear" either, as seen in the quote above. Streamers will have the ability to display their favorite snacks to viewers as well.

While Gear on Amazon seems to be directly related to "gear" like PC parts and accessories, the Amazon Associates Program includes commissions on pretty much everything, including toys, too,s and apparel. You can find the whole table here for what Associates will receive for various categories. For example, streamers would earn 1% commission on video games and video game consoles.

With the whole system in place for other items, it would not be surprising to me to see streamers take advantage of trying to talk about other products. And considering that Twitch is branching out from doing just video games, having a system in place for pretty much anything Amazon sells would make sense. And Twitch acknowledges that the announcement may be focused on gaming streams, but millions of products on Amazon are available to use with Gear on Amazon, so musical streams, talkshows, etc can put up products.


Quick Take

I'm not a regular Twitch viewer by any means but I can't imagine there is a significant amount of people thinking "hey what's this guy/girl using and how can I buy it?" Maybe there are a lot, but as long as the Gear on Amazon stuff isn't too in your face, it's probably fine. I know some streamers will abuse it in some way and push it on people, but that's always going to happen. If it's a new way to support a streamer you like with something you were probably going to buy anyway, that's fine. Same thing with supporting others you like through affiliate links.

Have a tip, or want to point out something we missed? Leave a Comment or e-mail us at tips@techraptor.net


Andrew Otton
| Editor in Chief

Andrew is the Editor in Chief at TechRaptor. Conned into a love of gaming by Nintendo at a young age, Andrew has been chasing the dragon spawned by Super… More about Andrew