Twitter Gearing up In-Tweet Commerce – Acquires CardSpring

Twitter is all excited after acquiring CardSpring so as to imply its very close goal of launching its own e-commerce platform- an attempt to become a large social commercial site, can say. As this viral news story goes on let’s have a detailed intervention on what both feels so far.

CardSpring is an application platform entitled for developers to help them build card-linked offers electronic coupons, loyalty cards, and virtual currencies that work with credit cards and other types of payments. Back in 2013, the company launched a full-fledged commerce analytics system- “CardSpring Connect” that jacks into a merchants existing in-store point of sale system and tracks how their sales are connected to online promotions through services like Foursquare, Trialpay, Thanx, MOGL, Roximity, Moblico, and OnStripe. CardSpring writes, “We had an impressive array of merchants and developers already working and Twitter shows up to be a powerful way to distribute offers built on our platform”.

And How’s Twitter Going To Use This?

Well, this acquisition is a weapon in the battle to be the web’s social commerce portal. Twitter shall use the CardSpring tech to offer discounts via a tweet where you would enter your credit card details on Twitter itself and then pay with the same card at the local store to avail the discount. Isn’t that cool? Meanwhile online retailers would get analytics allowing them to see how effective their purchases are.

Beating the Edges

Say for instance, when visitors like a post on Facebook, they click “Like”. On the other hand, in Twitter they “retweet it” so that the message is amplified to own followers, instantly. Similarly the former has a Share button on feed posts but the latter one embraces its re-sharing culture which is very attractive to businesses because it gives them free earned reach. In this new case, when a merchant simply tweets a CardSpring offer or buys ads, if it delights people they’ll re-tweet it, netting the business new potential customers.

All we would say is this is a win-win. CardSpring says, “With twitter, we shall continue to grow the adoption of our platform and work with our publisher, financial, and retail partners to create new, innovative commerce experiences for consumers."
So, pretty clear that a lot more can be expected in coming days.