A few months ago, Amazon.com introduced the hashtag #AmazonCart to give customers an easy way to add items they see on their Twitter feed to an Amazon online shopping cart.
This morning, Amazon is announcing the next step: Enabling customers to add products to their Amazon Wish Lists using the hashtag #AmazonWishList.
Both programs work pretty much the same.
Customers must first connect their Twitter account to their Amazon account. Then, when they discover a Tweet with a product link, all they have to do is reply to that tweet, adding “#AmazonCart,” or “#AmazonWishList.”
In the case of adding it to the cart, the customer has to go into their Amazon account to finalize the purchase. In the case of the Wish List, it will be added to their Wish List, where friends and family can view your gift preferences.
The first announcement got a fair amount of hype, including an appearance by Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo on CBS News This Morning, where he referred to the #AmazonCart program as “in-the-moment commerce.”
The additional hashtag was a logical next step, if the first experiment proved worthwhile.
Amazon does not have to share revenue with Twitter when customers add products to their Amazon shopping cart, or when people finalize the purchase from his or her account. So, in essence, the hashtag system is beneficial to Amazon as long as people use it to and make purchases.
So, the big question is, did the original hashtag service take off?
We checked in with the folks at Simply Measured, a Seattle-based social media analytics start-up, to find out.
Shortly after the program was launched in May, Simply Measured found that #AmazonCart was tweeted more than 157,000 times during the first two weeks. Since then, usage has decreased significantly with the past two-week period generating 78,000 mentions (activity has stabilized at around 5,500 tweets a day).
Of course, people need to reply in order to add things to their cart, and that’s where conversion rates get pretty low.
According to Simply Measured, there were slightly more than 2,000 replies in the past two weeks, so perhaps it’s more of a nice way of marketing products than driving a ton of sales.
An Amazon spokeswoman said it doesn’t have any data about #AmazonCart’s performance, but that they believe there are customers will be particularly excited about the addition of #AmazonWishList because they might be in more of a “discovery mode” on Twitter, rather than a buying mode.
Additionally, it doesn’t hurt that Amazon’s Wish Lists are insanely popular, especially around the holidays.
Amazon said last year one in three Amazon customers worldwide wished for an item, translating to 50 items being added to Amazon Wish Lists every second.
A new feature of the Amazon Wish List allows you to upload pictures and save it for future reference. Additionally, Wish Lists are universal, meaning that customers can add any item from any site with the use of a browser plugin.
Here’s the original video explaining how it works:
