Twitter Will Soon Add “Buy” Button to Tweets
I know what you’ve been thinking: online shopping is just too hard. You have to go to a website and, like, click stuff, and actually think for at least 60 seconds about whether or not you actually want to buy something. You’d much rather have the thinking removed from the equation and just buy things instantaneously. Well, good news! Twitter will let you do that very soon.
A post on the company’s blog today reveals that Twitter is working on adding a “Buy” button to the tweets that appear in your feed – specifically to tweets related to consumer products that are, well, buyable. The impetus here is to make shopping via mobile devices less cumbersome, and to provide Twitter users with deals they won’t be able to find anywhere else. That kind of thinking should, one would imagine, increase Twitter engagement overall:
“This is an early step in our building functionality into Twitter to make shopping from mobile devices convenient and easy, hopefully even fun. Users will get access to offers and merchandise they can’t get anywhere else and can act on them right in the Twitter apps for Android and iOS; sellers will gain a new way to turn the direct relationship they build with their followers into sales. We’re not building this alone: we’ve partnered with Fancy (@fancy), Gumroad (@gumroad), Musictoday (@Musictoday) and Stripe (@stripe) as platforms for this initial test, with more partners to follow soon.”
Of course, the Internet today is a scary place where security breaches happen pretty regularly. Twitter wants to assuage your fears that buying via its social network isn’t safe:
“We built this test experience with your trust and security at the forefront. Your payment and shipping information is encrypted and safely stored after your first transaction, so you can easily buy on Twitter in the future without having to re-enter all of your information. Of course, you can always remove this information from your account. Your credit card is processed securely and won’t be shared with the seller without your permission.”
This isn’t the first time Twitter started to make a move toward commerce. Back in May, Amazon teamed up with the social network to make buying products from the online retailer as easy as using a hashtag. Will this new initiative catch on? Do you want to buy stuff suggested to you on Twitter? Personally, I don’t – but I’m betting that there are plenty of people online who do. We may soon live in a world where the only way to get the best deals is to keep your eyes glued to your Twitter feed.