Twitter Adds Product Pages And Collections To Expand Shopping Experience

In an effort to utilize its massive amount of tweet data to encourage users to shop, Twitter is rolling out two new beta features, “Product and place pages” and “Collections.” Both of these will allow dealerships to surface and share more branded content.

Product and place pages will give specific products or places a dedicated page that features information related to the subject, such as pricing, websites, images, videos and Tweets. With the new feature, users will be able to group together products and places on dedicated pages. Consumers will be able to make purchases and book appointments for services directly from the page, although some products will redirect them to the retailer’s website.

These pages will be accompanied by Collections, which provide a way for users to create and share collections of products. Collections are intended to offer more of a browsing experience, which includes a handful of recommended products and places that have been selected by a brand or a high-profile curator. For example, Ellen DeGeneres has a Collection that highlights the “Best of the Ellen Shop,” where users can browse Ellen-branded products as well as others that she features on her show. The pages will also show Tweets about the products that are most timely and relevant to the viewer. Overall, the announcement of Product and place pages is an extension of Twitter’s “Buy” button on Tweets, which started rolling out last fall.

How much does it cost and when will it be available?

At least at its launch, partners don’t need to pay for a Product or Collection page, although they can choose to invest money to promote their page to a wider audience. So, it could truly be a free offering that increases the ability for users to find a dealer, and it definitely seems worth trying. Essentially, it will add a user-curated storefront to Twitter, which will give dealerships a way to reach Twitter users beyond Promoted Tweets. However, at this point, these new features are in a testing phase and are only available to select Twitter users, so dealerships will have to wait to try it until it’s rolled out to all users. Certainly, making these features widely available could strengthen Twitter’s relationship with advertisers, who frequently state their discontentment with the social network’s user engagement and growth levels, so it’s likely that its availability will increase in the near future.

The feature is launching with a small number of partners, including musicians Amanda Palmer, Demi Lovato, Ariana Grande and Steve Aoki, retailers such as Nordstrom, Target and the Disney Store, as well as several other well-known brands and personalities, including Nike, Warner Bros. and entrepreneur Michelle Phan.

What’s in it for Twitter? The most likely moneymaker for the social media network will be taking a cut of each purchase. At this point, Twitter is simply helping to get products off the ground, and the company isn’t taking a cut of sales revenue from most of its partners. However, the most logical next step, provided that the initial testing proves successful, will be for Twitter to start taking a percentage of the revenue that is derived from sales. It will be very interesting to see what direction Twitter goes with these new offerings in the future.