Amazon Prime has released a trailer for its spin on the Shark Tank concept: Buy It Now, a JB Smoove-hosted show where people put their product ideas before a panel of investors. The twist is that they’ll also be judged by “The 100,” which Amazon says is an audience of “potential customers” (otherwise known as “people”), and if their products are picked, Amazon will sell them in a special section of the store.
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. So, if you’re looking for some of Paltrow’s questionable Goop treatments, you know where to find them — or, at least, where to scan the QR code to find them if you subscribe to Prime Video.
Is this show a shrewd play to get you to buy more stuff on Amazon? Absolutely. On the plus side, at least the products will have intelligible names and you’ll know where they came from.
Buy It Now’s first three episodes premiere on Amazon Prime on October 30th and will run for 13 episodes until January 8th, 2025. A weekly behind-the-scenes companion podcast, called This is Small Business: Behind the Buy, starts the next day.