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Report: Bye-bye, Twitter “Buy”

The team behind Twitter's "Buy" button has been disbanded, and the company is focused on other programs and features that speak to its core experience.

Tamar Weinberg on May 25, 2016 at 5:40 pm

Twitter’s “Buy” button project is being stopped, a report from BuzzFeed indicates. The development of this social commerce component appears to be past tense, with most of the 25-person “Buy” team either having left the company or having been assigned to teams devoted to customer service or dynamic product ads.

What’s with this decision? It’s suspected that social commerce is simply not as popular as once hoped.

As a source tells BuzzFeed, “people are not buying on social media right now.” If so, it doesn’t justify the continuation of development for a product that may not necessarily convert for the microblogging network. However, it appears that dynamic product ads are performing well, and customer service is a big focus for user retention.

Social commerce may have been a consideration under Twitter’s former CEO, Dick Costolo, but with Jack Dorsey at the helm, it was important for the company to realign its efforts toward what makes sense for today, and social commerce just wasn’t part of that vision.

Today’s focus remains on increasing commerce through proven performance models, and dynamic product ads put the company out there — in fact, dynamic ad performance has been quite solid. In a statement provided by Twitter to BuzzFeed, the current plan for Twitter is to move fully into and continue to invest in dynamic ads. However, there is speculation that social commerce will be revisited down the road.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Tamar Weinberg

Tamar Weinberg is a professional hustler and author of The New Community Rules: Marketing on The Social Web. She blogs about all things tech, productivity, and social media customer success at Techipedia. She can be found on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, among other sites.