Twitter’s New Buy Button Accelerates Their Journey Towards the Dark Side a Commerce Platform

Amazon has experimented with adding things to your shopping cart through Twitter, but now Twitter itself is prepping and testing a full-blown “Buy” button to make purchases straight out of tweets. Now drunk tweeting will be even more dangerous! “What!? Buy this novelty superhero sex toy right here on Twitter? Yes. I’ll take 100 of them, please.”

The button is probably an extra draw for advertisers to pay to promote ads on Twitter, since customers can now buy products directly on the site. That’s great for Twitter, but for the rest of us, we’ll just have to hope this doesn’t mean too much of an increase in the number of ads we’re shown.

Here’s how the button itself works, as described on Twitter’s blog announcement:

In our test, an entire purchase can be completed in just a few taps. After tapping the “Buy” button, you will get additional product details and be prompted to enter your shipping and payment information. Once that’s entered and confirmed, your order information is sent to the merchant for delivery.

They promise security through encrypting all of your information, and handling everything without even sharing your credit card information with the merchant. Of course, that means giving your real personal data to Twitter, which will probably help them aim more ads at you.

If you want to try it out for yourself, the initial tests are starting with Fancy (@fancy), Gumroad (@gumroad), Musictoday (@Musictoday), and Stripe (@stripe), and they’ll be adding these partners in the weeks to come:

Beartooth (@beartoothband)
Brad Paisley (@bradpaisley)
Burberry (@burberry)
Dan+Shay (@DanAndShay)
Death From Above 1979 (@dfa1979)
Demi Lovato (@ddlovato)
DonorsChoose (@DonorsChoose)
Eminem (@eminem)
GLAAD (@glaad)
GLIDE (@GlideSF)
Global Citizen (@GlblCtzn)
The Home Depot (@HomeDepot)
Hunter Hayes (@HunterHayes)
Kiesza (@kiesza)
Keith Urban (@keithurban)
The Nature Conservancy (@nature_org)
Megadeth (@Megadeth)
Mike Stud (@mike_stud)
Panic! At The Disco (@panicatthedisco)
Pharrell (@pharrell)
Paramore (@paramore)
(RED) (@RED)
Ryan Adams (@TheRyanAdams)
Soundgarden (@soundgarden)
The New Pornographers (@TheNewPornos)
twenty one pilots (@twentyonepilots)
Wiz Khalifa (@wizkhalifa)
9/11 Day (@911Day)

It’s probably for the best that this is limited to a few partners and isn’t some crazy future technology where you can buy nearly anything you see, because things like this would become a real problem for my wallet:

BUY. 1000x buy.

(via BusinessWeek, image via Twitter)

Previously in Twitter changes

• Yeah, Amazon was really doing hashtag shopping carts
• Twitter’s other changes will show you more stuff you didn’t ask for
• They’ve also been trying to deal with their troll problem, finally

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Dan Van Winkle

Dan Van Winkle (he) is an editor and manager who has been working in digital media since 2013, first at now-defunct Geekosystem (RIP), and then at The Mary Sue starting in 2014, specializing in gaming, science, and technology. Outside of his professional experience, he has been active in video game modding and development as a hobby for many years. He lives in North Carolina with Lisa Brown (his wife) and Liz Lemon (their dog), both of whom are the best, and you will regret challenging him at Smash Bros.

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