Twitter Inks E-Commerce Deals to Grow Payments Reach

Twitter's goal of becoming a payments engine has gotten a boost, as Bigcommerce will support Twitter's 'buy buttons.'

The partnership potentially opens a new roster of merchants that can accept payments within 'buyable' Tweets. Bigcommerce's network includes nearly 100,000 e-commerce clients. Twitter on Wednesday also entered partnerships with two other e-commerce providers, Shopify and Demandware, according to Bloomberg.

Merchants can include a buy button on promoted or organic Tweets, highlighting products relevant to social conversations and enabling shoppers to discover and purchase a product on mobile devices or computers. Orders will be fulfilled within the Bigcommerce control panel for centralized processing.

"Consumer shopping behaviors are constantly evolving," said Brent Bellm, Bigcommerce's CEO, in a Sept. 30 press release. "Bigcommerce's Twitter Buy Now functionality provides an opportunity for our merchants to significantly boost demand generation and sales for their business."

Twitter debuted its payments function about a year ago, and has spent the past few months partnering with e-commerce sites to build a merchant base. Other social network and blogging sites are also experimenting with buy buttons, generally through the payments technology company Stripe, though the market for social payments has been slow to develop. The success of PayPal's Venmo suggests there is a potential market.

Bigcommerce has proven to be a popular way for mobile pay ventures to scale—the company recently inked deals with 2Checkout, PayPal and Square.