Image: Twitter
The recent decision by Twitter to pull “buy” buttons from its site has, once again, raised the question of whether social media sites and e-commerce mix.
For years, people have been waiting for f-commerce (f as in Facebook) to take off and it appears as though they will be waiting for a bit longer. Pinterest, which some thought of as the most likely to succeed in making social shopping work, has yet to prove it can turn consumers' interest in fashion, food, health and other products into direct sales.
Twitter failed to make a go of its e-commerce option despite having 310 million active users making one billion unique visits on a monthly basis. Roughly 83 percent of the site’s users are active on mobile devices.
“People are not buying on social media right now. They are still buying, for the most part, on mobile web,” an unnamed source said to be familiar with Twitter’s inner workings, told BuzzFeed News last month.
While Twitter is no longer building new tech to support its buy buttons, it is not necessarily the end of the shopping option. As an Internet Retailer report pointed out, third-party platforms are still able to insert the buy button option into their tweets and ads on Twitter.