STEPS OF USING TWITTER AS OLX

Twitter will begin experimenting with commerce. It’s the latest effort to expand the atomic unit of a tweet beyond 140 characters. The implementation is straightforward: a big “Buy” button that will appear alongside an image of the item for sale. Give Twitter your billing and shipping info once and you can make one-click purchases from inside a tweet if you’re logged into the app or web service.

The big question on Wall Street’s mind is whether this might provide the company a meaningful secondary stream of revenue alongside advertising. The more interesting question for the average consumer is if the real-time nature of Twitter might produce some interesting new forms of business we haven’t seen yet.

“There are already transactional conversations happening every day on our platform between brands and their customers or artists and their fans. What we’re trying to do is build the shortest path between an offer and a completed sale, to eliminate the friction of clicking a link that takes you to another website where you might have to type in a whole bunch of information each time,” says Nathan Hubbard, Twitter’s head of commerce.