\n
![](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/RSSPoster_PRO\/cache\/29aa5_3ebecdc0e4004b9a90d7eda6b9e967c9.jpg?w=640&ssl=1\")
<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
There have been rumors for a while about Twitter preparing to retire its commerce operation. Now it looks like the company has finally started to wind down its\u00a0partnerships in confirmation of that fact. Customers of e-commerce platform\u00a0Shopify<\/a> are receiving notices informing them that the Twitter sales channel is getting shut down \u201cas a result of the Twitter team pivoting way from their ecommerce focus.\u201d We have confirmed the note as legitimate. The short message, shared by TC reader Brody Berson<\/a>, is at the bottom of this post.<\/p>\n From what we understand, Twitter is now gradually winding down the \u201cBuy\u201d button, and with it the partnerships that it forged to bring in retailers and other businesses to use them. At the same time, Twitter\u00a0will continue to offer a \u201cDonate\u201d button to give to charitable causes and other nonprofits, which Twitter\u00a0will offer directly.<\/p>\n Other links to Buy information, such as this information page<\/a> on Twitter\u2019s Business site, will also slowly now start to disappear, as the products are no longer being offered.<\/p>\n None of this should come as a surprise, apart from the fact that it\u2019s taken so long.<\/p>\n The moves to wind down the Buy button come about eight months after a report<\/a>\u00a0noted\u00a0that Twitter\u00a0was\u00a0ceasing product development of its Buy button and was disbanding its commerce team. Nathan Hubbard, the executive who was leading that team,\u00a0left the company a day later<\/a>. A\u00a0few months after that, Twitter announced a new focus on its website conversions<\/a> product, which is where it is\u00a0now channeling interest in action-based marketing on the platform.<\/p>\n The Buy button made its first official appearance in September 2014<\/a>\u00a0in partnership with Stripe, Gumroad, Musictoday and Fancy. That was after Twitter quietly began<\/a> to work on the product earlier in the year. But the\u00a0rollout was slow: It took a whole year before Twitter expanded the service to a network of partners that included Shopify<\/a> (along with BigCommerce, Demandware and Best Buy).<\/p>\n But the\u00a0Buy feature and\u00a0Twitter\u2019s wider commerce efforts never managed to get much traction, neither from consumers and brands who didn\u2019t seem that interested in transacting in Twitter\u2019s stream, nor from Twitter itself.<\/p>\n The last time management referred to the Buy buttons and its commerce efforts in an earnings call, in fact, seems to be all the way back in July, 2015, when, in answer to a question from an analyst about how the company\u2019s commerce efforts were going, CEO Jack Dorsey replied<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s still super early for this project,\u201d he said somewhat prophetically. \u201cBut a lot of our focus has been around making tweets more relevant and delivering more relevant tweets faster to people, and as we do that, everything within the action, within the tweet action benefits, including something like commerce.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"brit](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/RSSPoster_PRO\/cache\/7294f_screen-shot-2015-09-30-at-05-42-16.png?resize=636%2C478&ssl=1\")
<\/p>\n