San Francisco payment startup Ribbon unveiled a new feature this week that enables consumers to find products or services for sale through Twitter, and purchase them without ever having to exit their feed.
Making In-stream Purchases on Twitter
With Ribbon's latest innovation, sellers will be able to create free, custom links listing items for sale on the micro-blogging site. Checkout pages are also embedded within the Tweets. To make a purchase using Ribbon, buyers simply click the "Buy Now" button, enter their personal and credit card info, and then click "Pay." It all happens entirely within your Twitter feed.
Ribbon is motivated by the idea that by not directing users to a third-party site, it may be possible to increase conversions.
Ribbon for Facebook and YouTube
If Ribbon sounds familiar to you, it could be because the company has already produced an in-stream payment option for Facebook.
This week Ribbon also introduced a payment platform for YouTube. Using YouTube annotations, video viewers can click a link that pops up over a video. This takes them directly to a one-page checkout.
The Challenge of Twitter
But creating a similar in-stream feature for Twitter was more challenging. Previously, they had only managed to embed product descriptions within tweets and then link out to a one-page checkout on the Ribbon website. But using the Twitter card API, Ribbon's developers were eventually able to embed the payment info directly into Tweets.
Speaking to Mashable, Ribbon CEO Hany Rashwan explained, "On Twitter, the experience was not up to our level because we could not do true in-stream. In many ways we see this now as us coming to Twitter in the way we originally wanted."
According to Rashwan, Ribbon has already been adopted by over 10,000 merchants.
Ribbon seems to have gotten the jump on Twitter itself, which has yet to produce an in-stream payment processing option.
Transforming Twitter?
At first glance, Ribbon would seem to have the potential to transform Twitter into the one-stop e-commerce platform many would like it to become. And having introduced integrated checkout directly into Facebook and Twitter, the people at Ribbon are now looking to introduce their platform to other social media networks, including Pinterest.
The cost for using Ribbon? Just 2.9 percent of the total sale plus a fee of 30 cents per transaction.
(Update 4/15 - As of now, the answer to this headline would be probably not, as Twitter cut off support for Ribbon's in-stream payment app, apparently for violating Twitter's TOS. It was later announced that Ribbon had been reactivated but in an augmented form that doesn't enable in-stream payments.)