Mobile Twitter Buy button - the enterprise take
- Summary:
- The Twitter buy button is an e-commerce experiment that should have brands rethinking their Twitter strategy.
Today we are beginning to test a new way for you to discover and buy products on Twitter. For a small percentage of U.S. users (that will grow over time), some Tweets from our test partners will feature a “Buy” button, letting you buy directly from the Tweet.
Named partners for the test include Fancy, Gumroad, Musictoday and Stripe while the vendor partners represent an eclectic mix that includes familiar brands like Burberry, Home Depot and Eminem along with a slew of mostly music brands and non-profits. Unsurprisingly, Twitter plans to make this available to both iOS and Android device users.
Included in the release is a long and somewhat vacuous statement about security. Again, not surprising and especially so after the iCloud debacle that engulfed Apple last week.
Your payment and shipping information is encrypted and safely stored after your first transaction, so you can easily buy on Twitter in the future without having to re-enter all of your information. Of course, you can always remove this information from your account. Your credit card is processed securely and won’t be shared with the seller without your permission.
The enterprise take
This looks like the first iteration of how Twitter sees e-commerce following its CardSpring acquisition.
Twitter seems to have lost some of its allure in recent months as more people seem to be active on Facebook these days. In any event, I've always felt that Twitter is really for a hardcore geeky or news driven audience rather a place for brands to find a home. The fact Burberry and Home Depot are jumping into the Twittery buy button pool adds a certain caché. We will have to see how this fleshes out before declaring that Twitter has become a go-to e-commerce platform.
As a first foray into e-commerce it absolutely makes sense to run a highly controlled test but I am puzzled by the very vague nature of Twitter's verbiage around security for the Twitter buy button. I would for example be far happier knowing that the vendor is taking care of this element and imposing requirements upon Twitter rather than the implication that Twitter is managing the security element. Why? If something goes wrong then to whom do I point the finger? How will credit card users be indemnified if Twitter inserts itself into the process and how will brands be protected from losing revenue in fraud cases?
Having said that, Twitter has shown itself to be better in keeping data secure than some other services I could think of to the extent of sometimes making it very difficult to reconnect an account. As someone who has been on the wrong end of the Twitter infinite loop, I can personally attest to the antiseptic and totally impersonal way in which Twitter has behaved.
This will be very good news for developers. We are in the very early stages of seeing elegant consumer experiences on any device. To date, Amazon has probably come closer than anyone to setting an experience standard of sorts but even there, things can always be better. The fact Twitter is putting this out as an experiment rather than a product release allows for a lot of feedback and sense testing.