Small Business Marketing News
The Retailing Of Social Media
Written by Tim Morral
Published: 5/20/2014
Amazon and Twitter join forces to deliver a more streamlined checkout experience to consumers, demonstrating the increasing connection between retail and social media.
For the most part, the relationship between social media and strategies for e-commerce has been limited to social reviews and the sale of ads on social media sites. But that may be about to change as a social media and e-commerce giants team up to create more streamlined experiences for online consumers.
Recently, Amazon and Twitter announced that they had joined forces to release #AmazonCart, a hashtag-based feature that enables consumers to instantly add products to their Amazon carts without leaving the Twitter application.
Although consumers will have to link their Amazon and Twitter accounts, the new feature allows them to seamlessly convert product tweets to cart items simply by replying to the tweet with #AmazonCart. Once in the cart, consumers can either purchase the item or remove it. But the key is that it #AmazonCart reduces the number of steps it takes for consumers to buy items that appear on their Twitter accounts.
"There's a public nature to social media, particularly with Twitter -- which doesn't have the barriers of other social media tools. We have a significant number of customers who use Twitter, and a significant number of affiliates who use Twitter, too. So to be able to allow customers to add something to their Amazon cart without leaving Twitter was sort of a logical step," Julie Law, an Amazon spokesperson, told TechTimes.
And Twitter isn't the only social media platform getting in on the streamlined purchase game. Autofill with Facebook provides a similarly seamless purchase experience, enabling users to automatically source billing information, credit card numbers and other data from their Facebook account into e-commerce checkout processes.
For online retailers, the lesson to be learned from the cozy relationship between social media and large e-commerce providers is that consumers are demanding convenient, effortless purchase processes online. The more that small e-commerce brands can do to simplify the checkout process, the more competitive they will be in the digital space.
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