The advantages of selling via Twitter and other such platforms will now be available to more retailers and brands, which will now be able to connect with such platforms with the help of a new tool launched on Monday by Stripe Inc., which is a payments processing company. The tool will help retailers be able to reach out to an increasing number of consumers who shop through mobile apps.
Relay to help Twitter with its e-commerce efforts
By adopting Relay, the new product from Stripe, Twitter will be able to enter deep into e-commerce and possibly generate huge revenues with the use of its “Buy” buttons. The new tool will help shoppers buy a product online and enter the payment and shipping details without leaving Twitter.
Twitter’s head of commerce, Nathan Hubbard, said, “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.”
Twitter, which went public in 2013, is struggling to accelerate its user growth and sees e-commerce as a vital tool to push up its revenues and expand its reach. Both Twitter and Stripe are based in San Francisco where the launch event took place.
More ease for users
Stripe’s Relay can be seen as a universal sell button for retailers, helping the firms to list products in one place and sell them directly on Twitter and several other e-commerce platforms like ShopStyle. The tool phases out the need to re-enter payment information every time, which is very tiring for customers and has been blamed for high rates of unfinished or abandoned online sales.
Patrick Collison, chief executive officer and co-founder of Stripe, who was also present at the event, noted that even before the transaction is completed, nearly two-thirds of mobile shopping carts are abandoned by users.
Stripe develops software for businesses to accept various types of payments on websites and in apps. The payment processing firm boasts of some major names as its clients, including brands like grocery-delivery ride-sharing app Lyft, e-commerce platform Shopify and startup Instacart.
