Twitter Becomes a Shopping Mall with the New ‘Buy’ Button

Twitter Becomes a Shopping Mall with the New ‘Buy’ Button

Twitter Tests Mobile Commerce With ‘Buy’ Button – Some Twitter users might see a “buy” button popping up on their feeds in the coming days as the social media site tests out a new e-commerce feature.

Twitter Inc. wants its users to more easily move from a tweet to a shopping cart, with the company unveiling its first foray into e-commerce. The social media company said on its blog Monday that it is testing a way for users to buy products on Twitter, and the move is an early step in its plans to make mobile shopping easy and accessible.

The company has partnered with social shopping platform Fancy, direct-to-fan e-commerce company Musictoday, Gumroad and Stripe as platforms for the initial test, and more partners will follow soon. Stripe helps companies accept payments online and in mobile apps, while Gumroad helps artists and others sell products online.

[blockquote cite=”Twitter”] This is an early step in our building functionality into Twitter to make shopping from mobile devices convenient and easy, hopefully even fun
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Twitter has dabbled in commerce over the past year since it hired former Ticketmaster Chief Executive Nathan Hubbard to lead the charge. It has partnered with Starbucks Corp and American Express Co. on some campaigns. This year it teamed up with Amazon.com Inc. where users can add Amazon products to their shopping cart via Twitter by responding to the product tweet with the hashtag, #AmazonCart.

In July, the company said it was buying CardSpring, a San Francisco payments infrastructure startup that connects merchants and payments processors.

Twitter’s move comes as other social networking sites are also experimenting with online and mobile commerce.