Twitter Prepares In-Tweet Shopping To Boost Revenue

Twitter is working on a way to let users purchase goods directly from tweets, according to leaked documents discovered by Re-code, as the microblogging platform looks towards e-commerce as a potential new revenue stream following its initial public offering (IPO) last year.

The company is reportedly close to agreeing a deal with payments company Stripe to handle back-end systems for the service, while it is also in discussions with a number of shopping sites – including Fancy.com, of which Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is a board member.

It is on a public area of Fancy.com that the screenshots of a potential Twitter commerce programme were discovered. The images are apparently a mock-up of what such a service could look like and show that commerce tweets would appear inside a user’s stream similar to how promoted tweets do now.

Twitter Commerce

Commerce tweets would also appear in the discover section, which shows a mix of activity from a user’s network and followers, and when expanded, would display product information and related items.  Users can then enter their name, address and credit card information within the application and might even able to see shipping updates, although this could be limited to items from Fancy.com.

Twitter has apparently worked on a number of commerce-related services in the past and never released them, however it is suggested that it is keen to explore shopping as a potential source of revenue following its flotation.

Analysts remain optimistic about Twitter’s growth prospects, but warn it must come up with a sustainable business plan. The firm’s S1- filing with the US Security and Exchange Commission (SEC), a form completed by almost all companies planning to go public, revealed it currently has 218.3 million active users and generated $253.6 million during the first half of 2013, but has yet to record a profit.

The majority of its income comes from advertising in the form of promoted Tweets and accounts, although it makes some money by licensing the use of its aggregated data to other companies. Things are moving in the right direction however. Sales doubled during the third quarter of 2013 to $168.8 million and the company is looking to generate more revenue outside the US in the future.

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