In an announcement released yesterday, Portland OR based Chirpify (formerly known as Sell Simply) states that they have launched the Twitter Commerce platform to enable Twitter users to sell goods and services or make purchases, donations, and person-to-person payments without leaving the social network. The service is integrated with PayPal for fund transfer. Chirpify received seed funding from fellow Portland firm, Upstart Labs.
“Brands, retailers, politicians, celebrities and individuals have spent the past six years using Twitter to build communities and brand affinity, so why not allow them to sell on Twitter directly?” says Chris Teso, founder of Chirpify. “Customers don’t have to leave Twitter to make a purchase or donation. Chirpify removes the frictions of traditional e-commerce check-out processes.”
How it works:
Chirpify integrates directly with PayPal to offer secure transactions on Twitter. Purchases and donations are as simple as replying to a Tweet: “@favoritebrand Buy,” or “@politician Donate,” for example.
Additionally, Chirpify offers deep integration with existing e-commerce storefronts, including Magento, for back-end fulfillment, listing and transaction management. To use Chirpify, merchants simply click the “list on Twitter” button when drafting an item listing for sale in their e-commerce dashboard. Inbound sales information appears as either an email or as part of the retailer’s back-end system, as well as via a DM on Twitter.
Because it works anywhere Twitter does, Chirpify is device agnostic, allowing any user on any mobile device, tablet or desktop computer to access Chirpify for seamless transactions.
“We identified Chirpify as solving a huge problem in the market: how to monetize social-media efforts,” says Greg Rau, founder and CEO at Upstart Labs. “Chris built an effective and elegant platform to deliver actual ROI based on revenue. Chirpify offers individuals, companies, organizations — anyone — the ability to monetize their Tweets.”