Twitter’s first ‘pay-per-tweet’ service

Twitter users will be able to pay for products with tweets by using a new American Express payment system integrated onto the microblogging site.

Hot on the heels of news that the cost of promoted tweets has been bumped up to $200,000 per day, American Express has pushed Twitter’s monetization and commerce drive ahead by launching a new ‘pay-per-tweet’ service.

This is the most ambitious ‘tweet-to-buy’ initiative yet, allowing users that have previously linked their account information to Amex’s Twitter Sync function to now pay for certain products simply by tweeting purchase hashtags.

After tweeting a hashtag (and they are currently available for products from Amazon, Sony and Xbox 360), Amex with confirm the request on Twitter, which the user must then retweet within 15 minutes to confirm the transaction (making a nice advertisement for all parties concerned). Payment will be taken from the synced account and the item delivered to the specified billing address.

We’ve seen examples of in-network product purchasing before. Soldsie is pioneering a platform that allows Facebook to buy goods simply by typing ‘buy’ into an item’s comments section, and there have been several initiative on Twitter allowing users to make purchases through tweets, including Chirpify and David Wolman’s efforts to sell books by encouraging customers to respond to specially encoded tweets.

This new arrangement aimed at providing a new source of financing for Twitter, which has so far been largely reliant on advertising revenue.

Understandably, neither Amex nor Twitter will discuss financial terms of their partnership, but Twitter doesn’t rule out taking a cut of future e-commerce sales.

The new service is currently restricted to certain products from certain manufacturers, and is only available in the US, for now. Amex’s video explaining the feature is below: