Twitter makes ‘buy now’ button widely available

After two years of testing, Twitter is finally making it easy for millions of merchants to sell products through a tweet.

The social network announced Wednesday that its “buy now” button will be available to any merchant in the United States that uses one of three major e-commerce platforms to run its online shopping operations. A store that is a customer of Demandware, Bigcommerce or Shopify can use the software to tweet out a link to a product that will show up with a buy button.

A Twitter user can then purchase the product in as few as two taps — one tap on the buy button and a second to confirm the purchase.

The first time people buy something through Twitter, they will also have to go through a screen to provide payment and address information.

“We have gone from testing this with hundreds of merchants to millions of merchants,” Nathan Hubbard, Twitter’s head of commerce, said in an interview. “It’s built into the software that they use every day to manage their business.”

Twitter’s expansion of its buy button comes as competing platforms are also beginning to offer e-commerce directly from their services.

In another development, Twitter may be about to hire co-founder Jack Dorsey as its CEO three months after he took over the job on a temporary basis. The technology news site Re/Code said Dorsey’s appointment could be announced as early as Thursday morning. If Dorsey is anointed as Twitter’s CEO, it will mark his second reign at the San Francisco company that he helped start in 2006.

Although Twitter is among the world’s best-known technology companies, it still hasn’t posted a profit and its user growth has been slowing.

This story was originally published September 30, 2015 at 3:49 PM with the headline "Twitter makes ‘buy now’ button widely available."