Why Twitter Commerce Won’t Happen

Today Twitter announced one of its biggest commerce moves yet, introducing the ability to add products to your Amazon cart with the use of a simple hashtag. They promise that it’s the solution to the problem of having to remember products you saw on your Twitter feed and then having to log into Amazon to buy them.

While there is indeed a problem in social commerce, this isn’t it.

You can’t simply wedge shopping into a social experience. When you do, you’ve suddenly become the equivalent of the friend who invites you over to dinner and then starts to sell you Amway, or the telemarketer who calls in the middle of the meal. Twitter needs revenue, Amazon needs social, but this partnership is unlikely to solve either problem.

We expect a sales pitch when we walk inside a store, but not when we hang out with friends. And furthermore your group of friends aren’t the resource you turn to when it comes to shopping for a new swimsuit.

Twitter is a powerful social network. It has incited revolutions, provoked conversations, and broken important stories. It’s become an social network for news, but not one for products. And the lack of ability to tweet to buy is not what’s holding it back.

The entire internet is becoming social, and that why over the years, we’ve seen a single dominant social platform for every basic human need - Instagram for photo, LinkedIn for jobs, Facebook for friends. And with each new platform, brands have been quick to jump on board in search of ways to leverage them for sales. But what brands are finding out is that while these platforms can be valuable for branding, they don’t have much value in getting users to buy.

There are very specific challenges to retail that require a single purpose platform - e.g. example, product data and product availability - so the real problem in social commerce is that there needs to be a social network dedicated to it. Enter Wanelo.

When users come to Wanelo, they aren’t entering a message board or a chat room - it’s more of a digital mall. It contains all stores and products in one place, so that you don’t have to go to each store individually, but it also injects the social fun that we get from gliding down an escalator with our besties, shopping bags in one hand and an orange julius in the other.

On Wanelo, you won’t find celebrity spats, but we do have Beyonce and Kim Kardashian socks. We can’t give you the latest updates on Miley’s antics, but we do have 2,000 products tagged #twerk. It’s not really the place for Throwback Thursday, but we do have 5,000 vintage stores.

The social elements of trending, hashtags, and followers all have a place in ecommerce, but their place is woven amongst the prime directive of shopping, not (hash)tagged on like a retrofit.