If you follow gamers a lot on Twitter this may be very usefuI to you! I know that since this feature has launched I tweeted a few times with some cool stuff but so far no one I’m following, other than Amazon which I don’t count, is posting stuff from Amazon.
If it becomes more popular I could see this being really cool for gamers. Tweet a game you are buying on Amazon so your friend can buy it to or maybe even buy it for you but adding to their cart from Twitter!
What is #AmazonCart?
Amazon and Twitter have become official. When you see a tweet in your feed that has an Amazon link in it, you can reply with #AmazonCart and the item will automatically go into your shopping cart on Amazon.com. Now of course it’s not really that simple, but it’s pretty darn close.
How does it work?
You have to log into your Amazon.com account and go here. There you will be able to link your Amazon account and your Twitter account. Then just follow the instructions they give you and you will can start shopping Amazon from your Twitter feed. For example: this capture card in one of my tweets.
I want to stream, so I really want this! http://t.co/ErnsalIYRD
— Stephen Pendergrass (@Pendysports) May 6, 2014
Pros and Cons
With this feature you can be sure to find some good and bad. Let’s get the bad out-of-the-way first. For starters, I get really queasy about allowing things to “post on my behalf,” and this does state that you must allow amazon to post tweets on your behalf. I have added a few items on my list using the reply #AmazonCart but so far no weird tweets. You will get a reply from @MyAmazon saying that they added the item to your cart so either make sure that’s set to private or maybe think twice about ordering that “special item” through Twitter. You know the one I’m talking about.
One other small negative that I found, which I’m sure is a bug and they will fix, is that if you want to reply #AmazonCart multiple times from either the same tweet or the same Twitter account, you have to type in extra text because if you try to just use the #AmazonCart, an error pops up saying “Whoops you already tweeted that.”
However the feature is actually quite cool. It will never actually buy the item, so no need to worry about being too quick on a purchase decision. It’s quite easy to sign up for compared to other features of its type. Allows you to share amazon items via Twitter to friends and family for quicker checkout. It seems to work really well except for that one bug I mentioned above. Overall this is a pretty cool new feature for both Amazon and Twitter.
