UK retailer Burberry is among the traders taking part in a Twitter pilot that enables some US users to buy direct from tweets.
In the pilot scheme a small, but growing, percentage of the social media site’s US users will see a buy button in some tweets from test partners that will enable them to buy simply by clicking the button. Initially, test partners include Fancy (@fancy), Gumroad (@gumroad) and Stripe (@stripe), but Burberry (@burberry) is among retailers who will be making ‘buy direct from tweet’ offers over coming weeks.
When they tap the buy button on a commerce tweet, users see further product details. If they decide to buy, they enter and confirm their shipping and payment information before the order goes to the merchant for delivery.
Twitter says it has put the emphasis on security, with payment information encrypted and stored after a first transaction for future uses. Payment information can be removed from the account at any point.
Twitter group product manager Tarun Jain said this was an “early step in our building functionality into Twitter to make shopping from mobile devices convenient and easy, hopefully even fun.
In this week’s blogpost Jain added: “Users will get access to offers and merchandise they can’t get anywhere else and can act on them right in the Twitter apps for Android and iOS; sellers will gain a new way to turn the direct relationship they build with their followers into sales.”