New Twitter ‘buy’ button takes on Facebook for social commerce

Twitter has teamed up with online payments startup Stripe to launch a new tool that lets merchants more easily sell their wares via tweets.

Called Relay, the feature lets sellers to include a Buy button in a tweet touting one of its products. When a user taps on the button they’ll have the chance to order the item direct from the app – in other words they won’t have to leave Twitter to complete the transaction.

Twitter has been struggling to increase its audience and in July said its number of monthly average users grew at its slowest pace since it went public in 2013.

“Almost two-thirds of our users say they bought something specifically because of what they saw on Twitter. … As mobile and social (media) continue to grow, consumers are going to discover and transact right in the apps where they spend their time every day,” Nathan Hubbard, Twitter’s head of commerce, said at a launch event in San Francisco, where both companies are based.

The payments company’s new Relay product functions as a universal sell button for retailers, allowing companies to list products in a single place and sell them directly on Twitter as well as other e-commerce platforms like ShopStyle.

Eyeglasses retailer Warby Parker and high-end department store Saks Fifth Avenue are among the first retailers selling goods using Stripe’s new service.

The company plans to promote the service with the more than 200,000 merchants who already rely on Stripe to power the payments in their own online stores.

Stripe will charge 30 cents in addition to 2.9% of each transaction through the buy buttons, the same fee it charges for its existing service. Currently, it only supports US dollars and items must be shipped to a US address.

Twitter won’t receive a cut of the transactions, but will seek to do so at some point as the tool becomes more widely adopted by merchants, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Twitter’s head of commerce, Nathan Hubbard, said there are about 50 million tweets each month in which users say they want or need something. In addition to selling regular merchandise through a buy button, Twitter has dabbled with exclusive offers like selling a limited number of tickets to a NBA play-off game or to a rock concert.