Snapchat’s Discover section is currently all about content. Soon it’ll be about shopping, too.
Shopping Is Coming to Snapchat, Board Member Joanna Coles Says
The messaging giant hired a head of commerce, Krish Jayaram, from PayPal-owned Braintree.
Asa Mathat for Vox Media
So said Joanna Coles, the editor in chief of Cosmopolitan and a member of Snapchat’s board of directors, speaking at Re/code’s Code/Media conference at The Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel in Dana Point, Calif., on Wednesday evening.
“Sweet is a channel on Snapchat that Hearst and Snapchat have done together, and the tagline is ‘Love something new every day,’” Coles said in an interview with Kara Swisher. “But at some point that will morph into an e-commerce platform so you will be able to buy from it.”
Speaking broadly of how Hearst-owned Cosmopolitan will generate more revenue online, Coles said, “clearly [through] e-commerce but I don’t think necessarily the tech bit is quite there, quite yet for how we would like to do it.”
Cole’s comments about Sweet’s e-commerce plans confirm an earlier report from Women’s Wear Daily about the project. A Snapchat spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
The messaging giant hired a head of commerce, Krish Jayaram, from PayPal-owned Braintree more than a year ago, but has only flirted with e-commerce capabilities so far.
It has sold extra features, like photo filters and replays, for a small fee. And it offers a money-transfer service called Snapcash that some in the industry see as an attempt to get users’ payment card information so they can more easily make purchases should Snapchat offer more stuff for sale.
Snapchat also invested last year in Spring, a slick shopping app where an array of fashion brands sell their wares. But it has yet to allow its users to purchase physical products through the service.
Hearst isn’t the only publisher to show interest in selling stuff through Snapchat. The Wall Street Journal, another Discover partner, told Re/code back in January that it would love to sell subscriptions through the app at some point down the road.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
