Facebook’s younger sibling Twitter has followed in it’s footsteps as a contender in social commerce. Except it goes two steps further. The site has been rolling out new technology to enable customers to purchase or add items to a wish list or shopping cart from Twitter.
Twitter announced the tool in a very American advertisement several months ago. The tool has only just been released.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAm6pa9hPKA
It enables customers to save an item mentioned in a tweet to their Amazon wish list using the hashtag #AmazonWishlist. Users can also add items directly to their cart using the hashtag #AmazonCart. Although there has been skepticism over whether #AmazonWishlist will work due to wish lists unpopularity, #AmazonCart is projected to be a success. A downside to these tools is users need to switch sites in order to complete the transaction – which is a fair bit more effort compared to Facebook’s one-stop shop approach.
Twitter is also testing a buy button similar to Facebook’s.
With all this considered, it seems Twitter may just surpass Facebook in terms of social commerce. Of course these are still early days.
