A few years ago, everyone was talking T-commerce, and how interactive television would has huge potential as a way for people to purchase goods and services. The idea was that you could be watching “Friends”, see a beautiful sweater worn by Jennifer Aniston, and then purchase it using an interactive e-commerce service. It sounded cool but the concept went nowhere.
While that “T-commerce” has pretty much disappeared, there’s another “T-Commerce” on the horizon with a lot of potential. In this case, the “T” is Twitter, and it has everything to do with the ability to buy and sell product and services using Twitter as the marketplace.
Companies such as Dell are already demonstrating how effective Twitter can be to sell products. Over the past 18 months, Dell has generated more than $1.5-million in revenue through sales alerts on Twitter that drive consumers to its Web sites. While it is not a lot of money in the scheme of things, it does demonstrate that Twitter can be an effective plan to drive sales.
There’s no doubt other consumer-focused companies will jump on the Twitter bandwagon, including e-commerce players such as Amazon and eBay. At the same time, Twitter will attract new player using Twitter as the platform to reach consumers. Here are a couple of examples:
Twitmart, a free classifieds marketplace using Twitter. In some respects, it has a Craigslist kind of look and feel – sparse and definitely no-frills – but it’s easy to use and, of course, free.
CheapTweets: It scans Twitter for the best deals, coupons and sales that people are tweeting about. Users can rate whether the deal is good or not.
These are just a couple of T-Commerce examples but there’s no doubt the market will gain a lot of momentum as organizations and companies look for new ways to buy and sell products and services amid a tough economic environment.
The big question is whether Twitter will be able to position itself as a middleman so it can take a cut of the action.
The Next T-Commerce Platform
A few years ago, everyone was talking T-commerce, and how interactive television would has huge potential as a way for people to purchase goods and services. The idea was that you could be watching “Friends”, see a beautiful sweater worn by Jennifer Aniston, and then purchase it using an interactive e-commerce service. It sounded cool but the concept went nowhere.
While that “T-commerce” has pretty much disappeared, there’s another “T-Commerce” on the horizon with a lot of potential. In this case, the “T” is Twitter, and it has everything to do with the ability to buy and sell product and services using Twitter as the marketplace.
Companies such as Dell are already demonstrating how effective Twitter can be to sell products. Over the past 18 months, Dell has generated more than $1.5-million in revenue through sales alerts on Twitter that drive consumers to its Web sites. While it is not a lot of money in the scheme of things, it does demonstrate that Twitter can be an effective plan to drive sales.
There’s no doubt other consumer-focused companies will jump on the Twitter bandwagon, including e-commerce players such as Amazon and eBay. At the same time, Twitter will attract new player using Twitter as the platform to reach consumers. Here are a couple of examples:
Twitmart, a free classifieds marketplace using Twitter. In some respects, it has a Craigslist kind of look and feel – sparse and definitely no-frills – but it’s easy to use and, of course, free.
CheapTweets: It scans Twitter for the best deals, coupons and sales that people are tweeting about. Users can rate whether the deal is good or not.
These are just a couple of T-Commerce examples but there’s no doubt the market will gain a lot of momentum as organizations and companies look for new ways to buy and sell products and services amid a tough economic environment.
The big question is whether Twitter will be able to position itself as a middleman so it can take a cut of the action.
CheapTweets - http://cheaptweet.com/
http://twitmart.org/