The Tough Sell Of Commerce On Twitter

Chirpify is a company that allows you to purchase items on Twitter, and now Instagram. If the idea sounds familiar it may be because American Express just announced a similar initiative, influenced by Chirpify no doubt. Music seems to have the biggest potential, or at least that’s what the company believes with their new #chirpifylovesmusic campaign. They’re forgoing their 5% cut of sales forever from anyone who signs up before the end of February. 5% is a pretty low amount to begin with so dropping that in favor of gaining mindshare seems like the right move.

I’m of two minds when it comes to commerce on Twitter. The obvious conclusion is that it seems simple enough, there’s a big audience, why not provide the ability to purchase a song or other product with a reply to a tweet. Immediately playing devil’s advocate however, I just don’t see how it could possibly catch on with mass appeal. Chirpify not only makes it easy, once you’ve signed up, it may seem too simple and just not make sense to people. It’s not the same as brick and mortar is to online shopping, it’s a completely new way of thinking about retail. Transactions are done with keywords not with standard shopping carts and something so different can be a huge hurdle to climb.

An issue I’ve run into with the service is the mobile problem. Since Twitter is inherently a mobile service, there are a lot of people using different apps on different mobile devices. This can be a road block when signing up, or a transaction doesn’t go through the way it should on the very first time. Again, when you have a product or service that’s potentially hard for a person to wrap their head around to begin with, you want it to work the first time. I’d love to see the process streamlined even more so that if you’re using Tweetbot on an iPad or a random client on Windows Phone, it works exactly the same and gets the same results. It seems the company quickly realizes they can’t live on Twitter alone forever as they’ve already branched out indirectly to Facebook (Instagram), but relying on any of these social networks seems a bit crazy.

With the new #chirpifylovemusic campaign cropping up with people I know and on sites I read, I can’t help but seriously question if this can or will catch on. I also keep coming back to how this retail experience helps music? Besides the low/no fees, which is an obvious plus for the musicians, is this good for the music consumer, does it provide more sales rather than less? At the present time I’m not sure it does. Here’s the example, you’re reading your Twitter feed, you run across a band you follow tweeting that they’re selling a new song, so you reply “buy” and the song shows up in your account on the Chirpify website. If the band would have tweeted out an iTunes link, you would have been taken to the music app, clicked buy and it would have been available on your phone. Not only that, but the song would have shown up in iTunes on your computer and any other iDevice instantly. It’s an uphill battle against iTunes which sell 15,000 songs every minute of every day. Chirpify has to up their game, possibly providing an app and revamp their website for functionality.

With all my hesitations and minimal gripes, I still want to see this company succeed. Beyond anything else, the biggest problem I see is getting people comfortable using the service and familiar with the process. Having more artists use and promote the service only helps with this. Plus if the company gives an independent artist more tools to capitalize on their music, there’s no reason to bet against Chirpify.