Sell something via a tweet. Twitter has been testing their buy button for two years. But today Twitter announced that the button is now available "to any merchant in the United States that uses one of three major e-commerce platforms to run its online shopping operations," according to an article in the New York Times by Vindu Goel.
So if you are a customer of Demandware, Bigcommerce, or Shopify, you can start using the Twitter buy button today.
"A Twitter user can then purchase the product in as few as two taps - one tap on the buy button and a second to confirm the purchase," writes Goel. "The first time people buy something through Twitter, they will also have to go through a screen to provide payment and address information."
"We have gone from testing this with hundreds of merchants to millions of merchants," Nathan Hubbard, Twitter's head of commerce, told the New York Times. "It's built into the software that they use every day to manage their business."
The release of the buy button comes at a time when other platforms are also beginning to offer e-commerce directly. YouTube announced on Tuesday that advertisers can place buy buttons in other people's videos. Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram are also testing buy buttons.
But Twitter is the first large social network to make the technology widely available to merchants.
It likes Facebook will not be #2. Sheryl Sandberg said on Tuesday that "Facebook studied the behavior of its 1.5 billion users and concluded that buy buttons should not be a high priority right now," according to Goel.