When Amazon announced their #AmazonCart integration with Twitter, the internet nearly tripped over itself in lauding the inevitable coming of age of social shopping. But, what’s really going on?
Our team at Simply Measured looked at the uptake of the #AmazonCart hashtag and did a great job shedding some light on how the program is going thus far:
After all those tweets, the top-discussed item was a romance novel – wow.
Our team spent some time batting ideas back and forth about how we could see how many people were actually completing orders of the items they were #AmazonCart-ing about, but without API access, that would be a bit hard. Users are prompted to Tweet or FB post about the item the ultimately end up buying, but I’m guessing the people choosing to do so aren’t numerous.
If that was the case, you could actually start tracking initiated #AmazonCart transactions and follow them through to completed transactions by matching someone’s initial tweet:
— Ron Schott (@ronschott) May 19, 2014
Then you could see when Amazon replied to them:
@ronschott Great! We added this item to your Amazon Cart. When ready, review your Cart http://t.co/mBBOt2QxQx and check out — MyAmazon (@MyAmazon) May 19, 2014
Then, once they bought, you could see (if they shared) their confirmation of purchase:
I just bought: ‘Photive 3000mAh Portable Backup External Battery… Reply w/ #AmazonCart to add this via @amazon http://t.co/aTCgNyDLbc
— Ron Schott (@ronschott) May 19, 2014
But, like I said, not many people seem to be posting their purchases. One problem I encountered was seeing a number of things I wanted to add to my #AmazonCart, but not being able to send a tweet to Amazon because I had already said the same thing to them 5 minutes ealier: 
Not very helpful. The other bit that, I’m guessing, might trip most people up is that you still have to actually venture to Amazon to complete your purchase. With American Express’ Twitter integration, you didn’t have to do much beyond tweet to get the things you wanted, which took the friction out of the equation. If #AmazonCart could take going to the website out of the equation, I’d certainly use the service more. As it stands right now, if I’m looking around the web and see a cool Amazon product, I’ll probably go straight to the site to add it to my cart and buy – heck, got to take advantage of the Prime membership, right? Just for fun, take a cruise through things that people are buying with this Twitter search:
https://twitter.com/search?q=+just+bought+Reply+w%2F+%23AmazonCart
jetcitydigital.com 