What’s the story with the #AmazonCart hashtag I see on some of my friends tweets? What’s Amazon cooking up, Dave?
I’ve written about buy now buttons in tweets on my business blog — see Buy Buttons in the Twitter Stream — but what Amazon’s now doing is really slick and sidesteps any cooperation on the part of Twitter.com, which gives them a lot more flexibility. What Amazon’s done is written a program that monitors Twitter for occurrences of the #AmazonCart hashtag and when it shows up, they identify the tweet that it’s in response to, then parse the original tweet for an Amazon product link.
If the original tweet has a link to an Amazon product, it’s then automatically added to your Amazon.com shopping cart (you can, of course, delete it later without buying the product). Simple, effective.
Here’s an example of a tweet I shared about a new book I was perusing at Amazon.com. To start, I sent out the tweet from the twitter icon on the product page:
A click and a window popped up:
You can, of course, tweak and tune the wording. Just leave the URL intact and the #AmazonCart info too.
It shows up as just another tweet, without any special notation or presentation:
The Beekeeper's Apprentice: or, On the Segre… Reply w/ #AmazonCart to add this http://t.co/ndnhJX1Qzl via @amazon
— Dave Taylor (@DaveTaylor) July 17, 2014
Click on “Reply” and ensure that the hashtag appears in the response (and that appears to be all you need) and it’s sent to the person who posted the original tweet as an @reply message.
More importantly, Amazon also detects it (after 20-30 seconds) and posts this:
@DaveTaylor Great! We added this item to your Amazon Cart. When ready, review your Cart http://t.co/nE8xma7IUs and check out
— MyAmazon (@MyAmazon) July 17, 2014
And when I went to Amazon.com in the Web browser, there it was, in my shopping cart:
That’s pretty darn cool!
Now, to be fair, you DO have to set up the connection between Twitter and Amazon.com. The first time you try to use #AmazonCart you’ll likely get a message like this:
@DaveTaylor Thanks for using #AmazonCart! Quickly verify your account to complete this Cart add: http://t.co/509lmxIGhT
— MyAmazon (@MyAmazon) July 17, 2014
Not too bad, you just have to authorize the app:
You’ll also need to log in to your Amazon.com account at some point along the way, but you’ve done that before, I bet.