Twitter confirms it’s testing a ‘buy now’ button

In what is probably the least surprising piece of news of the year so far, Twitter has confirmed that it’s testing a “buy now” button which will enable people to make purchases directly from tweets.

The button, which apparently give users access to offers and deals they can’t get anywhere else online, has been floating around for a couple of months now, initially showing off products sold by online store Fancy.

This in turn followed an initiative last year which saw Twitter team up with American Express which allowed people to make purchases using hashtags.

In its official blog post, Twitter says the button is “an early step in our building functionality into Twitter to make shopping from mobile devices convenient and easy, hopefully even fun”.

Right now, the service is available to a limited number of US users, with Twitter giving no timeline for when it expects to start rolling it out to other markets.

The stores it’s partnered with for the launch of the button include Fancy, Gumroad, Musictoday and Stripe as platforms for this initial test, with more partners apparently set to follow soon.

According to Twitter, an entire purchase can be completed in just a few taps:

After tapping the “Buy” button, you will get additional product details and be prompted to enter your shipping and payment information. Once that’s entered and confirmed, your order information is sent to the merchant for delivery.

The social network also claims that every effort has been made to make transactions secure:

Your payment and shipping information is encrypted and safely stored after your first transaction, so you can easily buy on Twitter in the future without having to re-enter all of your information. Of course, you can always remove this information from your account. Your credit card is processed securely and won’t be shared with the seller without your permission.