Another move has been made to make it easier for Twitter users to buy things directly from tweets. We’ve seen various announcements related to this topic over the past year or so, and the latest one comes from Stripe, which has partnered with Twitter and other companies, offering an API for stores to publish their products and enabling apps to read them.
The offering is called Relay and seeks to make it easier for developers to build mobile e-commerce experiences and for stores to utilize them. Stores provide product info to Stripe with its dashboard, the API or by linking their existing e-commerce system. Stripe announced that SAP Hybris is the first e-commerce integration it’s announcing, but that more will come later. 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. (You can try it out on this Tweet from @WarbyParker.) Or you can submit your products to be shown in a growing number of apps like ShopStyle and Spring.
For app developers, Relay is a set of APIs for building great in-app buying experiences. People can buy products directly within your app rather than getting pushed to third-party websites. Our friends at Wish have made their product catalog accessible starting today via Relay. You can play around with their data and see what kinds of buying experiences you could build.
Stripe appears to want its version of the buy button to be universal across apps, so it will be interesting to see if others in the industry like Pinterest and Facebook, who have already been dabbling in buy buttons, will integrate. Ultimately, all of parties want e-commerce to be better across their respective ecosystems.
Last month, Re/code reported that Twitter was in the process of integrating with Shopify and other e-commerce software companies to off buy buttons to a wider range of businesses.
Earlier in the summer, Twitter unveiled new product pages and collections, which show some interesting potential for e-commerce on the service.
Image via Stripe
