Twitter’s Biggest Ecommerce Move: The Buy Button

Hold the breaking news tweets and the flitter of media updates that flood your Twitter stream. Last week, Twitter made one of the biggest moves it’s ever made in ecommerce. Twitter is officially testing a “Buy” button, letting you buy something directly from a tweet. It’s about to get even easier to shop on your mobile device.

Twitter said in a statement on their blog, “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.”

As Mashable reported, Nathan Hubbard, the former Ticketmaster CEO who joined Twitter a year ago, Twitter has been working on this ecommerce project for over a year. It was the natural, next ecommerce step after letting users add products to their Amazon shopping carts by adding the hashtag #AmazonCart and partnering with Starbucks to let customers buy a $5 gift card.

Twitter didn’t take on this endeavor alone. In fact, they worked with a variety of different companies to bring together this service including:  Stripe, an online payment service, The Fancy, Gumroad and Musictoday. Through this partnership, the “Buy” button enables users to make a purchase in just a few taps.

Right now, Twitter is testing the buy button with a group of brands, artists and non-profits organizations. Some of the testing accounts include: @bradpaisley, @burberry, @HomeDepot and @RED.

Once this feature rolls out to more brands, we want to think about how this can help with an overall content strategy or campaign. It might mean fewer Twitter ads for certain clients – especially consumer clients – or a focus on the right messaging in 140 characters or less to drive a sale. As the holidays approach, Twitter could not have chosen a better time to make us all more addicted to reading every tweet in our stream, and following all of our favorite brands.

Have you seen the Twitter Buy button yet on any tweets?