Earlier this year, Amazon announced an integration with Twitter that would allow customers to add items to a shopping cart just by appending the #AmazonCart hashtag to a tweet. Today, the company is expanding on its Twitter functionality with the introduction of a new hashtag, #AmazonWishList, which – as you can guess – will post a tweeted product to your Amazon Wish List.
In order for any of this to work, you have to first connect your Twitter account to Amazon via amazon.com/social. After doing so, you can then shop and wish for items just by tweeting.
Frankly, it’s a bit of gimmick, as most customers will continue to shop Amazon through traditional means, but it’s still an experiment worth watching especially as Twitter tries to make “in-tweet commerce” work on its own.
That is, Twitter in July acquired a startup called CardSpring in order to develop instant commerce opportunities involving card-linked offers or tweeted promotions. This month, Twitter began testing out “Buy” buttons in tweets, with a small handful of retailers.
To what extent Amazon actually feels threatened by these efforts is unclear, but it’s not likely a major concern for the e-commerce giant at this time. Twitter is, after all, better known as a platform for sharing news and opinion, not a shopping destination.
In any event, Amazon’s Wish List Twitter integration may make more sense than either the Twitter or Amazon commerce features, because indicating an interest in a product, evangelizing or opining on it, fits in better with the way people use Twitter today. It’s easy to imagine users retweeting deals and product news from favorite merchants and adding the #AmazonWishList tag as a sort of “note to self.”
Amazon’s Wish List feature is a pretty popular tool around the holiday season, the company reminds us, noting that its customers added 7 books and 5 toys every second to Wish Lists last holiday season. And 1 in 3 users worldwide wished last year, with 50 items added to Wish Lists per second.
In addition to the Twitter integration, Amazon has also introduced a new “Save a Photo” feature to its Wish List service that lets you snap a picture of anything and post it to your list. This builds upon a fairly well-developed feature set which now includes a universal Wish List browser add-on, virtual notes, and “Don’t Spoil My Surprises” which keeps you from seeing what others have bought.
More on the Twitter-integrated Wish List is here.