Dive Brief:
-
Twitter is working with payment service company Stripe and online shopping site fancy.com to facilitate an app- and web-based shopping service for Twitter users, according to apparently leaked documents obtained by tech news site re/code.
-
Screens with what looked like a prototype of a “Twitter Commerce” system were found in a public area of fancy.com’s website, but have since disappeared.
-
“Twitter Commerce” tweets would appear in streams the way “Promoted Tweets” do now. Twitter has been criticized for failing to explore e-commerce opportunities and, just before its IPO, hired former Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard to spearhead such efforts.
Dive Insight:
Facebook has had little luck finding ways to make it easy for its users to buy products from within its site, and there’s no real reason to believe Twitter will be any different. But, of course, Twitter must try, and it will be interesting to see if such a thing as “Twitter Commerce” emerges, or how Twitter users will accept it. Twitter is in a much less enclosed space than Facebook, and its users can be quick to mock or complain about companies' foibles — sometimes leading to unintended consequences for corporate Tweets. It remains to be seen whether Twitter users will tolerate outright commerce in their streams, much less embrace it.