The service that let you “blog” fast wants you to “buy” fast as well. Twitter is testing a new ecommerce feature that lets merchants and artists sell through their tweets.
Taking much more than 140 characters to explain the new service, Twitter posted a 418-word post on its blog on Monday, explaining: “For a small percentage of U.S. users (that will grow over time), some Tweets from our test partners will feature a “Buy” button, letting you buy directly from the Tweet.”
The company is partnering with Stripe (which came in as the top rated online payment service in this year’s Sellers Choice Awards). Noticeably absent, at least during the test phase, was PayPal.
An entire purchase can be completed in just a few taps, according to Twitter. “After tapping the “Buy” button, you will get additional product details and be prompted to enter your shipping and payment information. Once that’s entered and confirmed, your order information is sent to the merchant for delivery.”
It also partnered with Fancy (@fancy), Gumroad (@gumroad), and Musictoday (@Musictoday) as platforms for the initial test. Twitter went on to discuss security, and wrote, “Your credit card is processed securely and won’t be shared with the seller without your permission.”
Twitter is starting the test with a group of artists, brands, and nonprofit organizations, listed on the post, including Burberry and The Home Depot.
There was no further mention of Amazon either, which added a feature in May that lets customers place items in their shopping cart by replying to tweets with the hashtag #AmazonCart.
