Twitter is finally doing away with the “Buy” buttons that allowed users to purchase items from within a tweet.
Twitter’s ‘Buy’ button is officially dead
It’s been a long time coming.
Andrew Burton / Getty Images
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.
The shutdown comes eight months after Twitter’s head of commerce left the company and more than a year after the company disbanded the group focusing on the Buy button product. Even without a team working on it, the service had still been live up to now. TechCrunch first reported the news.
A company spokesman confirmed the move, but said Twitter will continue to invest in ad products for retailers that help drive purchases via the social network.
Twitter’s Buy button initiative launched to much fanfare in 2014 at a time when the idea of building e-commerce capabilities into social networks was hot. But these efforts have not taken off with consumers, and the Twitter initiative was never at the top of the company’s internal priority list.
Facebook also launched — and later killed — a Buy button program, and is now investing instead in its own Craigslist competitor and shopping sections for Facebook business pages. Pinterest is still supporting its own take on Buy buttons.
The Twitter news also raises questions for its payment partner, Stripe, which has been courting big-name retailers and brands for a product that helps them sell items on tech platforms like Twitter. Twitter was by far Stripe’s largest tech partner on the initiative, however, so it’s unclear what comes next.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
