A Portland, OR startup called Chirpify has aligned with PayPal to introduce a platform to where users can buy and sell things, and donate and transfer funds using Twitter.
Chirpify calls this ‘T-commerce,’ and users can make and receive direct payments in a way similar to writing a check. To pay someone for anything, simply tweet their name, the amount, and reason. For example, to donate funds to a politician, the tweet would look similar to “@politician $Donate.” All receipts appear on a user’s dashboard, and currently the maximum transaction amount is $2000. Though it’s free to sign up for the service, to receive payment, the user pays a flat fee of 2%.
Twitter fundraising is also convenient with Chirpify. A non-profit can collect donations with one tweet, retweets also work and the system of donor info collection is adjustable.
At present, the only company using Chirpify is Powerbar, and founder Chris Teso hopes more vendors will catch on. Teso describes his platform’s appeal as a way for organizations to “instantly monetize their followers.” Teso’s previous T-commerce venture, Sell Simply, was launched last year for small vendors, but Chirpify is aimed at larger companies.
So far, vendors have used Twitter as mostly a broadcast platform. Chirpify lets users add commerce into their Twitter streams, allowing anyone to purchase something off of a tweet, just by responding with “buy.”
