Buy Now buttons in the Twitter stream

Jason Del Ray over at Re/Code is reporting that “Buy Now” buttons showed up for a short period of time in the mobile Twitter app, likely as a test. Apparently it’s related to a partnership that Twitter.com has been building with a shopping site called Fancy.

Here’s how it looked when it was being displayed by Twitter user Federica Merigo:

buy now buttons from @fancy showing up in twitter stream

Very interesting!

And I won’t comment on the proposed price of those sneakers, other than to say, holy cow, that’s an expensive pair of shoes!

More seriously, go look at a similar tweet from Federica on Twitter now, however, and there’s no “buy now” button showing up on the mobile app:

no buy now button, but get the fancy app button instead in twitter tweet

There is that “Get the Fancy app” button, though, which is something that’s just showing up in the mobile app, it’s not something coded in the Tweet.

You can see that from the Twitter.com Web view of this same message:

twitter.com doesn't have any buttons shown

Isn’t that curious?

It’s clear that the mobile Twitter app is doing something special for these tweet messages. But what, exactly?

Let’s go back to that “Buy Now” button, though. I’ll be candid, I like it. In fact, I’d argue that it’s a logical extension of what Twitter’s been moving towards for years, and coupled with something like Amazon 1-Click, well, that might well be darn dangerous in terms of impulse purchases.

I like it, especially if it’s something that all Twitter users will have access to and if it’s something where the text on the button is consistent and controlled by Twitter. Why? Because otherwise I can imagine scammers having tweets with buttons like “Learn More” that actually initiate a transaction — or load malware on your computer.

Actually, now that I think about it, there might need to be some additional controls for this to work safely and effectively.

What do you think?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *