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You Won’t be Selling eBooks on Twitter Any Time Soon, If Ever

One of the hotter fads of 2014 and 2015 was selling content and products on social networks. As the idea went, people on Twitter and Facebook would be thrilled to have the ads replaced with buy buttons where they could purchase books and other stuff.

Twitter bought into the idea in 2014 when when they launched buy buttons, but Twitter as a bookstore never got much further than Penguin selling a single title (The Martian) in mid-2015.

And now the idea is completely dead. Recode reports that first Facebook killed its buy buttons, and now Twitter has followed suit:

Twitter is finally doing away with the ‘Buy’ buttons that allowed users to purchase items from within a tweet.

The shutdown comes eight months after Twitter’s head of commerce left the company and more than a year after the company disbanded the group focusing on the ‘Buy’ button product. Even without a team working on it, the service had still been live up to now. TechCrunch first reported the news.

A company spokesman confirmed the move, but said Twitter will continue to invest in ad products for retailers that help drive purchases via the social network.

This should come as no surprise; DBW was still beating this dead horse in mid-2016, but this idea has been dead for a while.

I have never bought a book on Twitter, and I don’t know anyone who has bought or sold a book on Twitter. Sure, everyone has clicked a link and bought a book on Amazon, Gumroad, or what have you, but actually buy a book on Twitter? No, that just never happened.

And the reason this idea failed is obvious; people just didn’t want a store cluttering up their social network. They go to Twitter to chat over coffee, not to be tricked into attend a Mary Kay party.

Good riddance.

image by lkonstanski

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