Twitter, a social networking
platform, started showing clear intentions of adding an e-commerce engine to
Twitter when it hired Nathan Hubbard. Nathen was CEO and president at
TicketMaster, a stable e-commerce platform for selling tickets. Nathan joined
as head of commerce at Twitter. After working for one year with a vision to
transform Twitter into an e-Commerce platform finally they have come up with a
great test plan for Tweet-o-commerce. Currently this functionality is in test
phase for limited people residing in the US.
How Buying Tweet Works?
Twitter has now introduced a
concept of “Buying tweet”. This tweet will have a “Buy” button along with the
product description in 140 characters and an optional image. The specialty of
the buying tweet is that it allows us to perform the complete purchase
seamlessly without leaving the Twitter platform. It also allows us to store
information of credit card in an encrypted form with Twitter and remove at our
will. Once the information is stored with Twitter whole purchasing experience
is just a matter of 3-4 taps on a mobile device. For a user with account details
stored within Twitter, a click/tap on “Buy” button will lead to a form that will ask
for quantity (default 1) and delivery address (default address possible to
store). Then the next page will confirm the purchase. This kind of ease
of marketing is like a dream come true for digital marketer but for the user it
may result into compulsive shopping.
What is Buying Advertisement?
A "Buying tweet" can also be promoted
like a normal tweet. A promoted tweet acts as an advertisement more precisely a
buying advertisement. The unique selling proposition (USP) for this
advertisement is that we can purchase directly from the advertisement
tweet in just a matter or 3-4 clicks/taps. This also allows end to end tracking of the
success of the purchase. This generates a new career for temporal
digital advertiser who will sell temporal items through Tweet-o-commerce.
Different views on Tweet-o-commerce
Social Networking point of
view: People usually come to a social network to socialize and not to
purchase. So many people will be disappointed to see twitter turn in to a full
blown e-commerce engine.
User experience point of view:
If someone really intends to purchase, the Tweet-o-commerce provides a seamless
experience of purchasing instead of the experience of redirecting to some other
portal from where we lose track.
Security point of view: If
purchase is made directly through Twitter, an established organization, which can
be trusted as compared to third party e-commerce platform it increases trustworthiness
thereby increasing security.
e-commerce engine point of
view: Tweet-o-commerce engine is very different from traditional e-commerce
engines as it is innovative due to its ability to sell temporal items also.
Advantage Twitter
The USP of Twitter is its real
time nature. People use “Twitter” to get news before anyone else. Someone did a
study to compare the speed of reporting any incident on TV news reported by live reporters at the spot of incident and Twitter. Surprisingly Twitter won that by few seconds. The real time component of
Twitter cannot be replicated anywhere else. So items of temporal nature can get
global customers only through Twitter.
An example of items of temporal
nature is Bus Tickets that get cancelled at the last moment and have to be sold
by the people managing the bus from inside like drivers, conductors which
increases their work. Such tickets can be sold through via Twitter buying
tweets. Publishing these tickets through e-commerce platform would not help as
much as the Twitter can help in this case.
So Twitter has an opportunity to
open a whole new arena if temporal items start flowing through Twitter.
Partners and Sellers
The buying tweet will have a
‘Buy’ button. Payment will be processed on click of ‘Buy’ button. Partner
organization ‘Stripe’ will initially process payments for Twitter. Twitter has
also acquired a payment startup ‘CardSpring’ and it seems that they will build
their own payment platform if the experiment succeeds. Gumroad is a partner
e-Commerce platform providing sellers to Twitter. Initially Fancy, Gumroad and
Music today will be selling through Twitter to selected audience in the US.
Twitter: e-Commerce or Social network; Story of Hovercraft
When hovercraft was invented the
creators went to Air transport department but it got rejected on the grounds
that it did not fly. They then went to shipping companies, where they faced
rejection as it did not float on water. This required Hovercraft to create a
separate market segment as it was totally a different and innovative thing. Similarly
Twitter and Tweet-o-commerce are highly innovative and different from
traditional e-commerce and social media platforms.
When Twitter became popular
people tried to classify that as a social networking platform but it was not
like traditional social networking platforms. Then they tried to classify
Twitter as a blog engine but as the size of articles on Twitter is very small
they came up with a new name “Micro-blogging platform”. Now with the
introduction of e-commerce people will again try to classify Twitter into
e-commerce but again this time they will fail to do so. Actually Twitter is a
perfect blend of many good qualities of success platforms and has a lot of
innovative features too.
Concluding Remarks
Even if we consider
Twitter-o-commerce to be separate application it has a real time component that
does not exist anywhere else. So in conclusion Twitter is just Twitter and not
a social network, a blogging platform or an e-commerce platform.
Next article: Impact of Tweet-o-commerce on e-commerce and Digitalmarketing. [Link: http://snehshahani.blogspot.in/2016/03/tweet-o-commerce-impact-on-e-commerce.html]
