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Strategy

Twitter, Pinterest Enhance Shopping Features

As social commerce continues to trend, platforms are expanding ways for merchants to get their goods in front of consumers’ eyes.

It just got a little easier to shop while you tweet: Twitter announced a new shopping feature this week. Pinterest also made a shopping-related announcement this week, announcing an in-app checkout feature it’s adding for some users. Both developments point to the growing demand for social commerce options.

apps popping out of shopping cart on smartphone

Twitter Shops, as it’s called, was detailed this week in a blog post from the brand. The free-to-use feature lets merchants “handpick a collection of up to 50 products to showcase to shoppers on Twitter.” For users, it will look like this: The profile of a merchant with the Shops feature enabled will have a “view shop” button above their tweets. Tapping on the button opens the shop for browsing. When a person is ready to buy they click on a product, which will open an in-app browser where they can learn more about it and check out on the merchant’s website.

Twitter already had a Shop Module feature that lets sellers showcase up to five products on their profile, but the brand says this new feature “gives merchants a larger, fully-immersive space to highlight a longer catalog of products.” Features like these and its live shopping are part of a larger effort to promote and support businesses large and small on the site, according to Twitter. The brand has said it wants to attract another 100 million users by 2023 by making the site “more participatory and approachable,” according to The Verge.

Among the first Twitter Shops to be enabled this week were @Verizon, @ArdenCove, @LatinxInPower, @GayPrideApp and @AllIDoIsCookUS. Currently, only people who use Twitter in English on iPhones are able to interact with the shops, but Twitter says it plans to expand that access and come up with ways to make Twitter Shops more discoverable.

Meanwhile, Pinterest announced its deeper dive into e-commerce at its annual advertiser summit, noting that “users have long been asking for a way to shop directly on Pinterest,” according to Engadget. The in-app checkout feature is in beta for some Shopify sellers in the U.S., but the platform plans to expand access this year. The feature is similar to one Instagram started offering in 2020.

Earlier this year, Pinterest added an augmented reality feature called AR Try On for Home Decor that lets users place a piece of furniture virtually in their home to see how it would look before buying. “Since the pandemic began, we’re seeing more digitally savvy shoppers than ever before, as millions of people now expect virtual and mobile options to try before they buy, see personalized recommendations and gather information as part of their decision-making process,” said Jeremy King, senior vice president of engineering at Pinterest.

In addition, Pinterest plans to add a “personal shopping concierge” feature and to make it easier for sellers to upload catalogs to the platform and keep pricing up to date, according to Engadget. A trends tool will help sellers view real-time search data and learn more about their intended audience.

The continued push toward shopping via social makes sense, given how much time people spend on such apps, and it’s a development promot products professionals should take note of. “Social is the most logical and natural place to be able to shop and transact,” JP Hunt, partner and co-founder at InkSoft, has said previously.