Buy Buttons Coming To A Twitter Feed Near You
“Buy buttons” are all the rage right now: from Google search ads to Apple’s product pages, companies are streamlining the buying process by cutting out the need to toggle between several pages to purchase a product. Now, that simplicity can be found in your Twitter feed.
Online payments company Stripe announced Monday that it now allows retailers to sell their goods directly on Twitter and other e-commerce apps via a new service called Relay.
“Relay makes it easier for developers to build great mobile e-commerce experiences, and for stores to participate in them,” Stripe says in a blog post. “For stores, you can use Relay to enable instant purchases in third-party mobile apps: one of our launch partners, Twitter, is using Relay to enable anyone to start selling within tweets.”
According to Stripe, Relay lets merchants compose one buy button that can be placed on Twitter and other apps in as little as 30 seconds, streamlining a process that previously required customers to click through to retailer’s own websites — a task that can be complicated on smartphones.
The Wall Street Journal reports that eyeglasses retailer Warby Parker and Saks Fifth Avenue are among the first companies selling products using Relay.
Twitter’s head of commerce, Nathan Hubbard, tells the WSJ that by integrating Relay into its app, the social network is able to collapse the distance between consumers’ stated desires on the service and the ability to fulfill those needs.
“We have 50 million-plus users every month who are tweeting some signal of intent with the words ‘I want’ or ‘I need,’” Hubbard says.
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