Fancy shopping while you tweet? Sarah Dobbs finds out more about Twitter's new 'Buy' function.
Twitter is undergoing some changes at the moment. We've had new profile roll-outs, new feature roll-outs, and all sorts of changes to the terms and conditions. We've even seen a new tweet font replace the old familiar one on profile pages and streams. Now, Twitter's starting to trial another new feature, one that could genuinely change how we perceive and use the service: a 'Buy' button.
Yup, Twitter is hatching plans to get itself into e-commerce. Or, as the email announcement put it, Twitter is launching a feature that will "allow you to buy merchandise from some of the most popular names on Twitter, without leaving the Twitter experience."
The idea is that certain Twitter partners, for a fee, will be able to offer items for sale in tweets, and users will just hit the Buy button and spend their money there and then, without having to be redirected to a third-party website.
Twitter fanatics, or the more obervant reader of tech news pages, may have noticed the microblogging service's tentative steps into e-commerce over the course of this year: a couple of months ago it acquired CardSpring, a payments service, and it's also been experimenting with ways to link to Amazon's shopping cart. The Buy button appears to be the culmination of these experiments, and it's now time for Twitter to let the public have a go with it...
The Trial
This first trial is going to be an extremely limited one. It's only available to a small group of Twitter users, all based in the US, and even they will only see Buy buttons on tweets from selected Twitter partners.
That might seem overly cautious, but there are a lot of potential problems involved in launching a feature like this. In order to make the experience a seamless one, Twitter will need to store a lot more information about its users. Like their home addresses and their payment card details, for a start. All the stuff that Amazon already knows about you in order to make buying from them feel so painless it's almost like you're not really spending money, but that you really, really don't want falling into the wrong hands.
In order to make sure this launch works, Twitter is gonna have to make sure its security is beefy enough to handle that kind of ultra-sensitive data - and it's going to have to persuade its users of it, too. Considering how many phishing scams have popped up on Twitter over the last couple of years, with scammers nabbing control of users' accounts through dodgy DMs, that might be a hard sell.
The Ts And The Cs
Ahead of this trial, then, Twitter has had to update its privacy policy. Although the trial is only just starting now with a few select users, the terms and conditions have been updated for everyone - specifically, Twitter has added sections covering "commerce services", which explains what information
you can supply Twitter with, and how it's going to use it. So, you might fill in your address, credit card number, expiration date, and CW code, and let Twitter store that so when you want to buy something you don't need to pull your card out and re-enter that info.
If you are using Twitter's commerce services, you're agreeing that Twitter can hand that info over to retailers to facilitate the transaction (er, obviously), and also that Twitter can keep track of what you've bought in order to show you other offers in future. There's a bit about how private Twitter considers this info, and that it won't ever make it public, which is good to know. And there's a bit about fraud prevention, which says Twitter can also share information it's gathered about you with service providers to sort out disputes (you can read the whole thing at twitter.com/privacy, but it's pretty standard online shopping stuff).
The Future
Assuming everything goes to plan with the trial, then, we might all be able to buy stuff through tweets in the near-ish future. It'll be interesting to see if Twitter changes its layout or adds a Shopping tab to its website - it'd kind of make sense, since tweets are, by their nature, pretty ephemeral, and it's likely people would miss the shopping related ones if they just showed up once in their timelines.
If Twitter does decide to let companies spam you with commerce tweets over and over, it'd be so obnoxious that even the most hardened Twitter addicts would probably run away back to Facebook. A separate tab that provided a more obvious place to find and shop commerce tweets would make more sense. Plus it'd be the perfect reason for Twitter to get rid of the utterly useless Discover tab.
Will it work, though? If it does, it could provide a useful income stream for a company that's struggled to monetise its crazily popular service - Twitter could take a commission from every sale conducted through its platform, and the extra data it'd gather on its users could make targeted advertising ever more appealing to brands.
For that to happen, though, a lot of Twitter users would need to change their existing online shopping behaviour, and be happy with giving their credit card details to yet another site. Considering how popular Twitter is, should they be convinced, this could mean a big shift away from retailers like Amazon, which would be interesting... We'll just have to wait and see how it shakes out.
Who's Selling On Twitter?
Twitter's taking this launch slowly, so to begin with it's mostly teaming up with musicians, non-profits, and a couple of brand names to test the Buy button. The first list of partners, then, looks like this:
• Beartooth
• Brad Paisley
• Burberry
• Dan+Shay
• Death From Above 1979
• Demi Lovato
• DonorsChoose
• Eminem
• GLAAD
• GLIDE
• Global Citizen
• Home Depot
• Hunter Hayes
• Kiesza
• Keith Urban
• The Nature Conservancy
• Megadeth
• Mike Stud
• Panic! At The Disco
• Pharrell
• Paramore
• (RED)
• Ryan Adams
• Soundgarden
• The New Pornographers
• twenty one pilots
• Wiz Khalifa
• 9/11 Day
So the first purchases are likely to be music, gig tickets, and band t-shirts - then, if that works out, other brands are likely to want to get in on the action.