Twitter Rolls Out ‘Buy’ Button, Transforms Tweets Into Retail Engines

Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Twitter is now testing a system, long in the works, that lets businesses embed “Buy” buttons in their tweets, so that you can instantly purchase products through the popular social networking service.

According to the company, a “small percentage” of Twitter users in the U.S. will start seeing the Buy button today, and this percentage will grow as time goes on.

Earlier reports indicated Twitter was developing such a system, and apparently, non-working Buy buttons appeared on the service this summer, but this is the first time the company has publicly acknowledged efforts to transform its social networking service into a kind of e-commerce engine. “This is an early step,” the company says in a blog post, “in our building functionality into Twitter to make shopping from mobile devices convenient and easy, hopefully even fun.”

According to company spokesman Jim Prosser, Twitter has been “dogfooding” the technology inside the company, but it has not turned on Buy buttons for public use until now. Prosser makes a point of saying that tweets embedded with Buy buttons needn’t be advertisements, or “sponsored tweets,” meaning businesses needn’t pay to give them prime placement in front of the public at large. But the move is designed to make Twitter more attractive to outside businesses—and keep users on the service—and naturally, this helps drive advertising dollars.

The technology is part of a larger effort to combine purchasing with social networking. Newer social networking apps such as Fancy double as e-commerce engines, and now, older social services are moving in similar directions. Facebook is testing a “Buy” button on its service, and last year, the payments outfit Square—co-founded by Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey—rolled out a quasi-”Buy” option for merchants that use its Square Market service to promote products on Twitter. For Facebook and Twitter, integrated Buy buttons can potentially expand revenues in big ways. If advertisers know that ads can lead to a direct sales, they’re more likely to pay for them.

Twitter’s technology was built in tandem with Stripe, an up-and-coming startup that handles payments for all sorts of operations across the net. And the initial testers include Fancy, whose app already dovetails with Facebook in similar ways.

When you click on Twitter’s Buy button, you’re prompted to enter your shipping and payment information, and once this information is confirmed, the merchant in question will ready your purchase for delivery. “An entire purchase can be complete in just a few taps,” reads Twitter’s blog post. After your first purchase, your personal data is stored—encrypted—on Twitter servers, so that you can purchase more quickly in the future.