Twitter’s long-awaited plan to let its users make purchases right from a tweet is nearing, and payments startup Stripe will have a role in the business, multiple industry sources tell Re/code.
Twitter Is Working With Payments Startup Stripe on Its Commerce Initiative
While Stripe is believed to be Twitter’s only payments partner, it’s not clear whether that will remain the case.
Vjeran Pavic
Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.
Later this year, Twitter is expected to unveil buttons within tweets that say “Buy” or some variation of the word; after clicking on the button, shoppers are expected to be able to enter in payment and possibly shipping information without leaving Twitter’s service. Sources say that businesses that want to sell products or services within tweets are being instructed to sign up with Stripe to process payments on their behalf. While Stripe is believed to be Twitter’s only payments partner now working on the e-commerce business, it’s not clear whether that will remain the case over the long haul.
Twitter and Stripe representatives declined to comment.
Re/code first reported in January that Twitter and Stripe were in talks to work together, but that a deal hadn’t been finalized. Sometime between then and now, it has, sources say.
For Stripe, the deal marks another big partnership for the venture-backed company run by twentysomething brothers Patrick and John Collison. In June, the company announced that it was working with China’s popular digital payments service Alipay to allow its Western business customers to offer Alipay as a payment option for their shoppers. Stripe makes software that helps businesses accept various types of payments on websites and in apps, and is known among software developers for its ease of setup.
Twitter has considered integrating shopping functionality into its service for several years now, but the initiative became serious when the company hired former Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard to run it last summer. In June, Re/code reported that “Buy now” buttons had started appearing in some tweets and that an official launch would occur in time for this year’s holiday season.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
