Remember the time when purchasing items was a secondary site endeavor? Each time you would click on a company name to purchase an item, you would end up at a mobile shopping website that took you beyond Facebook or Twitter. Now, you may not have to worry about an annoying shopping website on Twitter.
The social media network is currently testing a “buy” button at its website that allows marketers to provide easy purchase access to products by way of the usual Twitter feed. Users who are interested in the product can select the “buy” button and purchase an item without leaving Twitter. The feature is only available to US Android and iOS users at the moment, and Twitter says that it intends to allow users to save their shipping and card information to make the purchase process a bit more effortless in the future. So far, Twitter has companies such as Home Depot, Twenty One Pilots, The Nature Conservancy, Soundgarden, and Burberry that have currently teamed up with the social media company’s buy feature.
Twitter’s new feature has been implemented with social media rival Facebook, who started testing its “buy” shopping feature in early July. Facebook’s Buy feature has seen companies such as Charlotte Russe and Nordstrom join its efforts to allow purchases from Facebook’s News Feed.
While some users may welcome increased convenience with the buy button, Twitter has been placed in a negative life within recent weeks for its decision to add tweets from your friends onto your Twitter wall. A number of Twitter consumers have said that any post that they share or comment on should not be public knowledge printed on their wall for everyone to see (especially when some are private in nature), but Twitter says that the feature has become useful to enable new users to find content and assimilate into the Twitter world.
While Twitter is working to catch up to Facebook’s success, Facebook is one step ahead. The company has plans currently to create a former Facebook archive whereby users can find former Facebook posts of their own or of those whose statuses they “liked” in days past by way of a simple keyword search.
