Twitter has announced that it is in the works of buying a developing company called CardSpring. CardSpring enables retailers to offer online shoppers coupons that they can automatically sync to their credit cards in order to receive discounts when they shop in physical stores. The logistics of the deal are undisclosed at this time.
“We’re excited to announce we’ve agreed to acquire CardSpring, a payments infrastructure company that helps merchants work with leading publishers to create online-to-offline promotions,” said the Twitter team in a post on its official blog. “As we work on the future of commerce on Twitter, we’re confident the CardSpring team and the technology they’ve built are a great fit with our philosophy regarding the best ways to bring in-the-moment commerce experiences to our users.”
Along with in-tweet shopping, the online-to-offline deals that CardSpring promotes will grant Twitter with a two-sided e-commerce strategy to pursue.
“We started CardSpring with a vision to develop a new type of platform that enables digital publishers and retailers to work with the payment industry to create a new generation of commerce experiences for hundreds of millions of offline shoppers,” said CardSpring in an official blogpost. “We see the intersection of payments and digital media as an opportunity to revolutionize how consumers use credit and debit cards, while helping retailers to connect and communicate with their offline shoppers – much in the same way the Internet has enabled online stores to create relationships with their online customers.”
This isn’t the first time Twitter has experimented with promotions similar to this. In the past, for example, if you were an American Express cardholder you could link your credit card account with a Twitter account and tweet #AmexBestBuy to automatically get a statement credit when you spend $250 in a Best Buy store.
It is with its acquisition of CardSpring (which should become official this quarter), however, that Twitter will now be able to formalize and broaden offers like this and make it even easier for shoppers to use. For now, Twitter users have to tweet a specific phrase or hashtag to get a discount. But the social networking site hopes that in the near future its users might be able to simply click a button in a tweet to load the discount to their cards. One possible benefit of all this, in addition to the marketing aspect, is if these were to be embedded in promoted tweets, Twitter’s ad business could also see a boost.
These features could be used in a variety of ways. For example, retailers could utilize them in order to target location-based deals to Twitter users. This would also allow Twitter to make profit off of shopping done in the physical world, an activity which still accounts for more than 85 percent of U.S. commerce.
As of now, Twitter is pushing to expand even further within it’s new-found interest of online shopping. Twitter’s goal is to release a feature that will enable users to purchase a product directly from a tweet in time for this holiday season. According to Re/code, Twitter will most likely work with payments company Stripe to help facilitate in-tweet purchases.
Source: Re/code
