Amazon has partnered with Twitter to launch functionality allowing people to reserve items from within a tweet. It follows similar moves by American Express. But will tCommerce do any better than fCommerce?

1. Amazon &
Twitter Launch
#AmazonCart
Ciaran Norris 09 May 2014
Background
Twitter and Amazon have announced a partnership that will allow users to add products to their
Amazon basket with a simple tweet. This seems to be another example of Twitter looking to find
and build out new revenue streams, presumably to stave off detractors on Wall Street who have
punished the company recently by driving their shares down almost 50% since their high of
$70USD. Whether this is enough to attract new Twitter users remains to be seen; slow user growth
is why the shares have fallen.
Details/Implications
Since hashtags were created by Twitter users back in its early days, they have been used for any
number of things, and this move to solidify their position in the purchase cycle is simply an
extension of existing trends. Early in 2013 American Express launched a service to allow its card
holders to take advantage of special offers and buy products with a tweet. #AmazonCart works on
a similar system, whereby shoppers simply sync their Amazon & Twitter accounts; they can then
reply to tweets which include an Amazon URL with the hashtag and the item is added to their
basket. The user still needs to complete the purchase by logging on to Amazon afterwards.
Allowing brands to turn their Twitter streams into shop fronts is undoubtedly one that will interest
many advertisers but, as one analyst put it, this could well be “a solution in search of a problem”. In
order for this to take off it will need to tap into existing consumer behavior or be such a boon that
it convinces shoppers to adopt new ones. The history of fCommerce (storefronts on Facebook)
would suggest that it may struggle to do either; whilst a number of brands launched commerce
platforms on their Facebook profiles many have since been shuttered.
Twitter is trying to create new use cases for people to come and spend time on the platform, as well
as creating new ways of unlocking advertiser budgets. However it is debatable whether Twitter’s
problem is really that people don’t have enough ways to use it or whether the problem is that it is
simply a product that already meets its users’ needs, which unfortunately don’t match the
ambitions of Twitter’s financial backers.
This new feature may bring new legions of users on to the platform, but it is equally possible that if
brands start incessantly tweeting ‘buy now’ links that existing users may look elsewhere for their
real-time social needs. For Amazon however, the benefits are obvious: even if relatively few people
use the service those that do will have provided Amazon access to their social graph, with all the
associated rich seams of data that suggests. The hope is that this is simply an early iteration of
brands finding new ways to make the most of Twitter’s platform. O2’s clever use of Twitter as a
customer service platform is a great example of this and hopefully #AmazonCart will evolve into
something similar.
Summary
Twitter is looking to increase user numbers and engagement, as well as opening up new revenue
streams; Amazon meanwhile simply wants to give buyers every opportunity to spend their money.
The current iteration of the service doesn’t seem like one that will see widespread adoption, but
could be a sign of tweets to come.