Twitter to move into e-commerce

Twitter could soon be something more than just a social media site. The site is currently known as the frontrunner in real time news; tracking celebrities, politics and stocks but the company now intends to move into selling via the website as well.

It has been reported but not confirmed  that Twitter is planning to enable its 232 million users to purchase products directly from the site, as part of a new online retail venture called Twitter Commerce.

According to Re/code, the technology blog, the transactional service is a collaboration with a US e-commerce site called Fancy, which counts Twitter founder Jack Dorsey as an investor and board member.

Mock-ups of the e-commerce idea show how Twitter users could make a purchase from viewing a tweet with a picture of a product and a button that says “buy with Fancy”.

Facebook tried out a similar idea in September 2012, when it launched the Gifts spin-off that allowed users to buy physical goods from the site.

However, it scrapped the scheme after less than a year due to a lack of user demand.

Twitter’s move into e-commerce, which builds on last year’s “pay by tweet” studies in partnership with American Express, comes ahead of its first set of results as a public company on Wednesday. According to analysts’ forecasts, Twitter’s losses in 2013 more than doubled to $140.9m (£85.7m), with a $14.82m loss in the last three months of the year.

This move by Twitter could perhaps work more effectively than it did on Facebook, due to the fact that Twitter users tend to re-tweet current events and trends very quickly so everything on the site is very fresh. Therefore if people are instantly updating what they are buying via the site, other users may be inclined to follow. I think that it is a positive idea and it will be interesting to see how it pans out for Twitter.