Twitter Jump Starts Shopping Experience With Product Pages & Collections

Accelerating its efforts to become a ecommerce marketplace, Twitter today introduced two new ways for brands to display their wares on the social network.

The new features — product pages and Collections — will give businesses the opportunity to create another beachhead on the social network. The product pages are dedicated landing zones that include tweets about the product, user reviews, photos, videos, pricing and in some cases a buy button that allows people to make purchases without leaving Twitter.

Collections enable brands or high-profile curators to compile a group of product pages to give people a place to browse, an experience very similar to boards on Pinterest.

Twitter is calling the effort a test, but with 41 launch partners it’s more fully formed than the usual Twitter experiment. Among the launch partners are Target, the Disney Store, Nordstrom, Nike and influential users like Ellen DeGeneres, Michelle Phan, Steve Aoki and William Shatner. Twitter said it plans to expand its roster of curators over time.

Some current examples:

• Demi Lovato Demi’s Picks
• HBO – Game of Thrones #GoT Fan Favorites
• Nike LeBron Elite collection
• Target Swim & Sun Ready
• The Ellen Show Best of The Ellen Shop

Collections can be accessed from a link on user profiles on Twitter.com and from a button in the iOS and mobile apps. Within Collections, brands and influencers can gather pages about products and places that they want to feature.

Because Twitter’s buy button feature is still officially in limited testing and because some retailers likely prefer to handle their own transactions, not all items can be purchased directly from product pages; many include links to businesses ecommerce sites.

Read more on Twitter’s blog post about the announcement. Also see our related post, Up Close With Twitter’s New Product Pages & Collections For Shopping.