Twitter’s buy buttons to now enable anyone to sell

Twitter, with the help of payments startup Stripe, is expanding its buy buttons so that anyone can sell their things via tweets.

The  San Francisco-based Stripe launched a new product yesterday called Relay, which made it easier for retailers to sell their products within third-party apps that used Stripe, including Twitter.

Relay is essentially a set of tools that streamlined the buying and selling process for retailers and developers.

"For stores, you can use Relay to enable instant purchases in third-party mobile apps," the company wrote in a statement.

"For app developers, Relay is a set of APIs for building great in-app buying experiences. People can buy products directly within your app rather than getting pushed to third-party websites."

Though Stripe had powered Twitter's "buy" buttons since they were rolled out last year, the news yesterday comes as a significant expansion of the service in that now anyone could use Stripe's technology to sell items through Twitter. Glasses retailer Warby Parker as also ad subscription box service FabFitFun both showcased their "Buy" buttons on Twitter yesterday.

As Relay's functionality was not limited to just Twitter, developers could use Stripe's tools to streamline the selling process within their apps.

In the past, developers had to direct users to a website or a separate app to complete a transaction. However with Relay those transactions could take place within the same app.

According to Patrick Collison, co-founder of the digital commerce startup only about 15 per cent of e-commerce sales happened on the phone.

He added that the web was still the main venue for making purchases online, and the mobile web, did not quite work for shopping.

''The obviousness and significance of the problem has been on a lot of folks' minds,'' Collison said during a presentation in San Francisco yesterday.

Stripe was now valued at $5 billion thanks to its success in removing obstacles to online transactions. Anyone with even modest technical skills could start accepting credit cards online within 10 minutes of setting up a Stripe account.

''We have 50 million-plus users every month who are tweeting some signal of intent with the words 'I want' or 'I need,' '' Twitter's head of commerce, Nathan Hubbard told wired.com. By integrating Stripe's Relay platform, Hubbard said, Twitter is able to collapse the distance between that desire and the ability to fulfill it.