Amazon and Twitter team up to build better shopping wishlists

Twitter really wants you to buy stuff from your timeline and has spent the last few years figuring out how to make a play for your wallet. But if you’re not an impulse shopper, clicking a buy button or hashtagging a tweet to snag something right then and there is too much pressure. Amazon’s latest Twitter effort dials it down a notch with wishlists instead of purchases. Like #AmazonCart, the company’s first Twitter shopping initiative,#AmazonWishList requires you to connect your Twitter and Amazon accounts. Then you can reply to any tweet containing an Amazon link with the hashtag, and Amazon will add the item to a new wish list called, appropriately, #AmazonWishList. Amazon’s official @MyAmazon Twitter account will respond to your hashtag with an update about whether the item was successfully added to your wish list or not.

Amazon shoppers can now add products to their wishlists with a single tweet. The e-commerce company’s second shopping hashtag, #AmazonWishlist, which launched Wednesday, builds on its nascent social-media shopping efforts. This type of marketing is on the rise, offering retailers another way to attract customers. The new hashtag is connected to the site’s popular wishlist-making tool. To use the hashtag, Amazon shoppers must connect their Amazon accounts to their Twitter accounts and reply with #AmazonWishlist to tweets with Amazon product links. The item is then added to a wishlist and the shopper receives a reply tweet from the company’s @MyAmazon account and an email. One in three Amazon customers added items to wishlists last year, the company noted. Amazon also rolled out a “save-a-photo” feature for wishlists on Wednesday, allowing customers to take a photo and add it to a wishlist. In addition to the more common use of social media to communicate with customers and promote products, Amazon created the ability to add items to shopping carts through tweets with an #AmazonCart hashtag earlier this year. Amazon has yet to go as far as allowing direct purchases from within Twitter, but that could be just a hashtag away.