Impulse shopping online got a little easier Monday with Twitter’s announcement that it will begin testing a “buy” button on tweets.
The San Francisco-based company plans to gradually roll out a product that will enable users to make purchases with just a few taps. “This is an early step in our building functionality into Twitter to make shopping from mobile devices convenient and easy, hopefully even fun,” Twitter said in a blog post.
Twitter has tapped Stripe Inc., a San Francisco-based payment company, to allow credit card purchases with only a few clicks, Twitter’s head of commerce, Nathan Hubbard, told Bloomberg News.
This isn’t the first time Twitter has dabbled with e-commerce.
In May, Twitter teamed up with Amazon.com to make it possible for users to add products to their Amazon shopping carts through tweets. To do so, users respond with “ AmazonCart” to tweets containing links to products from the online retailer.
Other social media sites have shown interest in e-commerce in the last few years, including Facebook.
In 2012, Facebook added an e-commerce feature allowing users to buy and send gifts to one another, but later discontinued it and instead is testing a buy button in its ads, according to TechCrunch.
Social bookmarking site Pinterest is also dipping into e-commerce with “Rich Pins,” which give more details about a product, including the price. No buy feature exists yet.
To e-commerce expert, Ken Wisnefski, the gradual addition of the buy button seems desperate. “While this new feature is intriguing, it’s not likely to make a huge impact on the revenue of Twitter,” Wisnefski said in a recent report.
“The nature of Twitter is quick, fast information, not e-commerce,” he said.
For now, Twitter’s buy feature will only be used by select nonprofits, retailers such as Home Depot and artists such as Keith Urban.
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