Twitter, who isn’t alone here, has been slowly integrating a Buy button into their site. In fact merchants can buy promoted tweets with a buy button to send them directly to their site and buy a specific product. However, that integration is about to get even bigger. With Twitter and Shopify integrating the button, along with a few other e-commerce companies to offer their buy buttons to a bigger range of businesses. This would include both large and small businesses. Currently, Shopify has around 100,000 merchants in the US that use their software, With this Twitter deal, those companies would be able to sell their products within Tweets using Shopify and Twitter’s integration.
Like I mentioned at the beginning of this article, Twitter isn’t the only one integrating buy buttons into their site. So are Facebook and Pinterest. Both of which are very large social media websites. Facebook more so than Pinterest. However, these three social media companies are unable to just integrate buy buttons for merchants to get more sales. They are needing to rely on companies such as Shopify to help with that. All three of these platforms have deals with Shopify right now. However those deals don’t mean automatic success, unfortunately.
Twitter has been looking for more ways to promote products on the platform. Because while shoppable tweets make Twitter plenty of money, they don’t show up for every single Twitter user out there, and largely depends on the advertisers budget. Twitter’s Commerce team who is lead by Nathan Hubbard (Ticketmaster’s former CEO) is heavily engaged in improving this. And one of those improvements has been product pages, which they launched back in June. The team is also working on other ways to help make products easier to discover on the platform, and drive in more revenue for not only Twitter but also merchants who use Twitter to promote their products.
In the past, Twitter has had a tough time bringing in some decent revenue, but this could be a big way for the company to drive up their revenue in the near future. Many companies use Twitter to promote their products, and it’ll likely be easier to get customers through Twitter than the likes of Pinterest and Facebook.