Tweet-o-commerce: Impact on e-Commerce and Digital Marketers

This article is in continuation to my previous article on “Tweet-o-Commerce”. [Link: http://snehshahani.blogspot.in/2014/12/tweet-o-commerce.html]. Previous article describes Tweet-o-commerce and how it will change the way we purchase real time products. Once Tweet-o-commerce becomes successful it will have a huge impact on traditional e-Commerce platforms and digital marketers. e-commerce platforms might have to modify the way in which they work and include real time component while digital marketers will get a new tool to sell new kind of products as well as old ones.

Difference from Traditional e-commerce platforms: Push vs Pull

Traditional e-commerce platforms are optimized for ‘pull’ of a product. They have search facility, categorical/hierarchical arrangement of products to enable better searching. While “Twitter” is optimized to ‘push’ the product as it has UI for advertising. People come to “Twitter” not just to purchase but to get their daily feeds and in this session our advertisements can be pushed. Though “Twitter” has facility to search in the form of #hashtags but it is not well structured as compared to traditional e-commerce engines.

Impact on e-Commerce platforms

Current e-commerce platforms will have to evolve a lot to compete with Tweet-o-Commerce if it becomes successful. This is due to the intuitive nature of Twitter, which provides excellent user experience and ease of purchase by just few taps on mobile platform. So traditional platforms will have to attempt making certain changes in order to compete with Twitter. For example they may start providing live updates of new items in their platform.

One thing that traditional e-commerce platforms are good at is they provide highly intuitive interface in ‘pulling’ the items that customer wants, while Twitter will be a very good platform in ‘pushing’ items to the potential customers. So customers will still go to traditional e-commerce platform for pulling the product. So the traditional e-commerce platform may attempt to provide ‘push’ functionality by using gadgets described below.

Gadget 1: Recommender Gadget

Recommender gadget will show currently hot items in market. This gadget should have capabilities to provide/show personalized items based on the interest of current user. This personalization may be done based on cookies or the user profile. This can be done by using different profiling techniques.

Gadget 2: Pub-Sub gadget

E-commerce engines will have to develop mechanisms to provide push messages to their users. These mechanisms can be in the form of publisher-subscriber where customers will get push feeds only for the type of items for which they subscribe. For Twitter this can be done by using keywords in the form hash tags. User will subscribe to a set of hash tags.

Impact on the life of Digital marketers

Digital marketers definitely get a new tool to play with, with the advent of Tweet-o-Commerce but they will need to add new skills to their current portfolio. Digital marketers will have to acquire domain knowledge of temporal items and design new ways to sell those. This would be a totally new domain added to digital marketing portfolio if this becomes successful.

Such a marketer should be able to prepare catchy one liner advertisements which should convey the message in short. They should be able to track the sale in real-time and modify the campaign accordingly at the same time. Time is very important in such push based real time commerce. So taking decision to modify the campaign should be very fast. Apart from that retrospective analysis of the impact of a push message has to be done quickly to ensure that same mistake is not repeated.

Conclusion: Push based e-commerce will have a major impact on the way we think and if successful it will revolutionize the digital marketing by opening a new market segment of selling those items which were not being sold through computer based platform.

Disclaimer: The terminology introduced in the article like Buying Tweet, Tweet-o-commerce are author’s own and does not reflect Twitter’s views on the same. These terminologies are introduced with an intension of increasing the readability of the article.