Twitter has been experimenting various monetization strategy for sometime now. Their “sponsored tweets” and “mobile advertising” channels seem to have been doing well as was visible from their 2Q2014 revenue which was pegged at $312 million, a 124 percent rise from same quarter a year ago.
However, Twitter needs to explore more ways of monetizing their 270+ million active users. Considering that nearly 60 million tweets are send out on daily basis, the opportunities in front of Twitter are immense.
Earlier this year Twitter had started experimenting with in-tweet purchases, where third party e-commerce sites could directly use Twitter as their store-front. Over last 6 months they seem to have tested this model with various e-Commerce sites.
Twitter has now announced that they have partnered with bunch of U.S eCommerce stores, artists, bands and Non-profit organizations. Some of their prominent partnerships include Fancy (@fancy), Gumroad (@gumroad), Musictoday (@Musictoday) and Stripe (@stripe).
The “buy from tweet” will be available to small percentage of U.S users and will subsequently be offered to all. According to official announcement, “This is an early step in our building functionality into Twitter to make shopping from mobile devices convenient and easy, hopefully even fun”.
Twitter users on mobile who have access to this will get offers and merchandise they can’t get anywhere else and can act on them right in the Twitter apps for Android and iOS. Twitter users from web apps and Twitter site may not see the “Buy Now” button.
A Twitter user can order and pay for a product directly inside the twitter app with just a few phone taps. After tapping the “Buy Now” button, user will need to enter their shipping and payment information. Once that’s entered and confirmed, the order information is sent directly to the merchant for delivery.
The payment and shipping information will only be needed to entered once, and for subsequent purchases, customer can complete the order with just two touches – “Buy Now” and “Confirm”.
Check out their introductory video below:
Will “Buy From Twitter” Work?
Yes, it will – however, it will work for only certain type of products and services. Buying from Twitter may not be right for high-value purchases or for products that need research to be done before buying. For low priced products and services that are standard and do not require much research like buying music, concert tickets, standard apparels like Tees etc are expected to quite well.
Twitter understands this and that’s why initially they have tied up mostly with popular artists and bands who want to sell their creations.
Incidentally, World’s largest online store Amazon too has introduced something similar where twitter users can directly add products to their Amazon cart through twitter using #AmazonCart Hashtag.
Twitter Updated Privacy Policy
With introduction of this new feature, Twitter has also updated their privacy policy (as they will now be collecting shipping and payment information). They sent out mails to all Twitter users earlier today indicating the change in their policy. Here is the mail they sent out to everyone.
The updated policy mainly relates to additional information that Twitter will now collect such as ,a credit card number and shipping address, the Privacy Policy update includes new sections on that information.
