Twitter and Amex to Collaborate on E-Commerce Sales on Twitter

It seems soon Twitter will also become a shopping mall apart from being a short messaging service. Twitter and American Express Co. said this Monday that they struck a partnership to allow Twitter users to buy products for the first time directly on Twitter.

All those who own American Express cards can connect it to their Twitter accounts and then can post on Twitter to purchase a selection of products which include Kindle Fire tablets from Amazon, discounted gift cards from American Express and even jewelry from designer Donna Karan.

The program is intended to start in the next few days.

Questions have always been raised on the revenue making capabilities of Twitter and this hints  at a potential new source of revenue for Twitter. Apart from that, the success of this experiment will also help Twitter in establishing a link between marketing on Twitter and making revenue out of it.

Marketers for the most part devote a small chunk of their advertising budgets to Twitter, partly because it’s tough to prove a tweet or an ad on Twitter leads to a sale. Being able to directly show consumers seeing a Twitter message and buying a product may prove that connection.

“We’re convinced that commerce is going to be one of the areas (for which) advertisers are going to start using our platform,” Joel Lunenfeld, Twitter’s vice president of global brand strategy, said in an interview.

Mr. Lunenfeld said it’s too early to tell whether Twitter would throw itself open to e-commerce and take a fee from those sales.

American Express also has announced similar card-sync arrangements with Facebook Inc., Foursquare Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox Live videogame-and-entertainment service.