Twitter Starts Testing 'Buy' Button on Mobile Devices

After months of rumors circulating about Twitter’s (News - Alert) e-commerce ambitions, Twitter announced on Monday that they are going to publically start testing a “Buy” button on mobile devices.

The company first dropped hints about its interest in this type of project last year when former Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard was hired to lead Twitter’s commerce team, and the company continued to recruit other commerce specialists.

This new mobile commerce feature hopes to integrate online shopping into users news feed, making purchasing an item as simple as a few clicks on a smartphone.

Twitter does not stand alone on this endeavour they have partnered with Fancy, Gumroad, Musictoday and Stripe for the initial test, hoping to gain more partners soon.

The feature is suppose to be aimed at selling time sensitive items, like concert or event tickets, and even limited time clothing.

This new feature creates a new source of revenue for Twitter, which now currently relies almost entirely on advertising.

Twitter is going to start by selling products from famous musicians, like Rihanna, Brad Paisley and Demi Lovato, along with companies like The Home Depot and nonprofits such as Donors Choose.

According to Twitter’s blog, “This is an early step in our building functionality into Twitter to make shopping from mobile devices convenient and easy, hopefully even fun.”

This step for Twitter makes financial sense, it has the possibility to open up a world of revenue and more support from brands and businesses looking to profit and support Twitter’s new “Buy” button.

Yet, how simple is it really? Twitter’s blog explains that once a user hits the “Buy” button they will be lead to product details, prompted to enter billing and shipping information in a safely encrypted location and then the order is sent to the merchant for delivery.

Twitter’s goal is to seamlessly incorporate purchasing items into user’s Twitter experience.

Twitter is going to start by selecting a few U.S. users to test the button, and is only available on Android (News - Alert) and iOS, but Twitter hopes that it will eventually be available it to all users- there is even rumor of it expanding onto desktop – though mobile seems to be the hotter focus at the moment.