Amazon teams up with Twitter to launch #AmazonCart

Now you can make purchases from Amazon directly via Twitter

We’ve all faced the dilemma of seeing something awesome on Twitter and wanting to buy it post haste, but hesitating over whether to leave the app to go find it on Amazon. So you try to just log it away in your brain, and you inevitably forget, and you’re like, “why do I have to struggle with this? Why hasn’t someone come up with a way for me to buy everything I see instantly without having to stop what I’m currently doing to do so? WHY ARE WE HERE? #ExistentialDread.”

Amazon is on it, you guys. So put your #ExistentialDread away for the next time you have to split a bill at a restaurant and one of you doesn’t have the PayPal app.

Amazon has teamed up with Twitter to allow you, Eager Consumer, to buy all the things right now with #AmazonCart. You simply link your Amazon account to your Twitter account via Amazon’s social settings, and then whenever you see a tweet containing an Amazon product link, you can respond with #AmazonCart or #AmazonBasket (in the UK), and the item will be instantly added to your cart. Amazon will then send you an email to let you know that the item was added to your cart (or if it was out of stock).

Interestingly, the #AmazonCart action tag doesn’t act as a 1-click setting—you’re not immediately purchasing the item via tweet, which would be awesome. The action just saves the item in your cart and you can only purchase it when you review your cart.

While not an insta-buy option, it’s still a huge step forward in leveraging social media for commerce. While social networks like Pinterest have emerged with built-in pathways to purchase, other social media platforms haven’t been quite so amenable. With Facebook, for example, commerce companies like Amazon have had to rely on “pull”—getting potential customers to visit their page and “like” it in order to receive updates on items in their newsfeeds. Hence the reason you see so many “like this page and be automatically entered to win a $25 gas card” and other such nonsense.

With Amazon’s foray into the Twitterverse, there’s still an element of pull there—you have to follow Amazon or follow someone who follows Amazon in order to get the product links. BUT, therein lies the strategy behind #AmazonCart: when a user replies to a tweet with #AmazonCart, all of his or her followers will see it, in effect turning consumers into instant billboards for other Twitter users.

Still—it would be cooler if #AmazonCart acted as a 1-click buy all on its own. SOME DAY, MY FRIENDS.