Twitter’s Buy Button Going Buh-Bye

It looks as though the rumors about Twitter ending its commerce operation and phasing out its buy button are true.

The social network platform is slowly retiring its partnerships, TechCrunch reported. The outlet confirmed a note sent to customers of eCommerce platform Shopify that stated the Twitter sales channel will no longer be available “as a result of the Twitter team pivoting away from their eCommerce focus.”

TechCrunch said that though Twitter will continue to offer its “Donate” button allowing users to give to charitable organizations, the company will continue to phase out its “Buy” button offering as well as its retail partnerships that use the button.

Last June, in a bit of foreshadowing about where the company’s commerce efforts were going, Twitter’s Head of Media and Commerce Nathan Hubbard left the company after three years of working with the social media giant.

Hubbard, who started at Twitter in 2013, was hired to enable in-tweet purchases at a time when networking platforms were rushing to embrace the new wave of social commerce. That effort, however, came to an end last week as Twitter disbanded its commerce team and put the kibosh on its buy button feature.

An end to Twitter’s social commerce ambitions came as numerous members of the 25-person commerce team left or were let go from the company, which led Twitter to reallocate its resources and focus on improving customer service and dynamic product ads.

“People are not buying on social media right now. They are still buying, for the most part, on mobile web,” a source close to Twitter’s commerce team told BuzzFeed News last year. “There’s still an active ‘Buy Now’ card at Twitter, but no one’s putting any work into it. There’s no new product development happening.”