Buying a pair of sunglasses is now as easy as clicking a tweet.
On Monday, Twitter announced a new partnership with Stripe, an e-commerce service that does payment processing for popular apps like Lyft and Instacart.
That partnership will allow companies to sell products to people through tweets. As this tweet from Warby Parker shows, you can buy a pair of non-prescription sunglasses without leaving Twitter.
And if it turns out that this is the way people end up wanting to buy things — directly on Twitter instead of through a company's website — then expect to see a lot more tweets with "buy" buttons, and not just on Twitter.
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During a press briefing on Monday, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison said the idea behind the platform, which the company is calling Relay, is meant to make it easier to pay for things on a phone. Only 12% of mobile app users buy things on their phones, said Collison, but 60% of all web browsing happens on mobile.
"It's not built for mobile," said Collison, referring to the lengthy process that's usually required in a mobile app or website to pay for something like sunglasses. "It’s like an obstacle course before people can pay you money."
As an example of what Stripe's Relay platform looks like in Twitter, Warby Parker published a tweet today with an integrated buy button that lets you buy a pair of its sunglasses through your Stripe account with a few clicks.
—Warby Parker (@WarbyParker) September 14, 2015
Curiously, the buy button is only accessible through Twitter's website right now. On Twitter's official mobile app viewers just see a link to Warby Parker's website.
Twitter is only one social network, and for Stripe to succeed with Relay, it will need to have its buy buttons everywhere. Re/code reports that Pinterest has no plans to support Relay's buy buttons right now, and Facebook is testing its own way to let you easily buy things you see on its network.
The end game for these social networks and partners like Stripe is to let you buy things easily as your scroll through your Twitter timeline or Facebook news feed. If that's an experience people like, it should take off.
