Twitter’s looking to become a bigger ecommerce presence, and a major step in that quest is to allow users to make purchases without every leaving Twitter’s walls.
This past summer, users spotted a ‘Buy’ button inside some tweets. From that, it was clear that Twitter was at least testing, if not planning on entering the mobile shopping space. In early September, the company confirmed a slow rollout of the buy button.
Now, according to a report from VentureBeat, Twitter is looking at an early 2015 timeline for the wide rollout of the initiative.
Until then, expect the buy button to remain a small test, with a small number of users and a small number of retail, artist, and nonprofit partners. Here’s the current lineup of buy button partners:
Fancy, Gumroad, Musictoday, and Stripe. Brand partners include: Beartooth, Brad Paisley, Burberry, Dan+Shay, Death From Above 1979, Demi Lovato, DonorsChoose, Eminem, GLAAD, GLIDE, Global Citizen, The Home Depot, Hunter Hayes, Kiesza, Keith Urban, The Nature Conservancy, Megadeth, Mike Stud, Panic! At The Disco ,Pharrell, Paramore, (RED), Ryan Adams, Soundgarden, The New Pornographers, Twenty One Pilots, Wiz Khalifa, and 9/11 Day.
The buy button is pretty simple. It’ll appear inside tweets in a user’s timeline, and when clicked will allow them to quickly buy products with only a few taps. All you have to do is enter your payment information one time and Twitter will encrypt and “safely store” (its words) your private info.
“We built this…experience with your trust and security at the forefront,” says Twitter.
“This is an early step in our building functionality into Twitter to make shopping from mobile devices convenient and easy, hopefully even fun. Users will get access to offers and merchandise they can’t get anywhere else and can act on them right in the Twitter apps for Android and iOS; sellers will gain a new way to turn the direct relationship they build with their followers into sales,” it added in the official announcement.