Tweet-o-Commerce

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]

Disclaimer: The terminology introduced in the article like Buying Tweet, Tweet-o-commerce are author’s own and they do not necessarily reflect the terminology used by Twitter. These terminologies are introduced with an intention of increasing the readability of the article.