Soon, businesses may be able to sell products directly on Twitter as the company is reportedly in the final stages of making a deal with payments startup Stripe.
This according to Re/Code, citing people familiar with the deal, which is not yet complete.
Neither company is commenting, but this would be a move that we’ve seen coming from Twitter for months, if not years.
All the way back in 2011, CEO Dick Costolo spoke about commerce opportunities for Twitter. He talked about how the San Diego Chargers had used Twitter to quickly sell 1,000 tickets to a game that would have otherwise been blacked out.
“There’s a commerce opportunity there for us to take advantage of if we want,” Costolo said. “How can we remove friction from the process?”
That was over two years before Twitter went public. Now, it needs revenue streams more than ever, and it looks like they’re ready to make a move in that direction.
More recently, this past August, Twitter announced that it had hired former Ticketmaster boss Nathan Hubbard as its new Head of Commerce (Twitter really has a thing for tickets apparently). Bloomberg quoted him as saying:
“We’re going to go to people who have stuff to sell and help them use Twitter to sell it more effectively.”
“One of the hallmarks of Twitter’s entire approach has been partnering. We’re going to take the same approach with owners of physical and digital goods.”
Earlier in the year, Twitter partnered with AmEx to let cardholders use Twitter to buy things using hashtags.
Image via Stripe
