Looks like “Larry, the bird” has got its beak on retail. The latest stint from the popular micro-blogging platform, “Twitter” is… Guess what? A plunge into “E-Commerce”. “E-Commerce! The word might seem quite impossible to millions of users who are ardent fans of the social media platform. But it’s true.
Reportedly Twitter had been looking at retail features of quite a while. Various sites and users had brought up claims of bumping into tweets of retail sites with an inactive “buy” feature a couple of months ago. With the latest updates rolling out last week,a “Payment and Shipping” section has been tinkering of late in the settings tab of it’s Android app albeit, for a select few. This option allows users to include their address and credit card information facilitating purchases.
With an optimistic second quarter turnover, the social network’s plans to expand into retail might be a move to please investors who seem a bit dizzy these days, over falling revenues and a shrinking user base. However, this move by Twitter isn’t surprising. Twitter had already partnered with various credit card processing services and also had a deal with Amazon.com Inc. in May to allow users to add products to their shopping cart without leaving the social network.
Rival social giant Facebook Inc. has also began deployment testing of a new feature that providing for small businesses to sell merchandise through their posts and ads on the site’s news feed. According to the company, the testing was limited to smaller businesses, to see if users consented in having it store their payment information, and possibly helping companies launch an online retail presence.
Now with social networks turning towards social shops, lets see what else do we get from them. Still then, stay tuned for more exciting tech news on BlogZamana.