Ministry of Innovation / Business of Technology

Simultaneously shop and annoy your followers with #AmazonCart hashtag

You can now use Twitter to shop on Amazon without shopping on Amazon.

Technology has advanced to the point that we can shop and engage with brands simultaneously.

If there's one problem in our lives that technology hasn't solved, it's that we don't have enough ways to buy stuff from Amazon. Luckily for us, there's now #AmazonCart, a new hashtag that will let you add things to your Amazon shopping cart without ever leaving the warm embrace of your favorite Twitter client.

Here's how it works: first, link your Twitter account to your Amazon account. Then, any time a person or a faceless brand tweets an Amazon link, reply to that link with the #AmazonCart hashtag to add the item to your shopping cart for later. You'll still have to go to Amazon via your browser or one of its mobile apps later to complete the transaction, but all of your #AmazonCart stuff will be sitting there waiting for you.

#AmazonCart is one of those things that seems like it's designed to make your life more convenient, but in reality it's just a way to encourage the sharing of Amazon links rather than links to other retail sites. Amazon's intro video uses several examples that don't seem like they'd come up in real life—in one, a user following the Watch Dogs Twitter feed adds the game to his Amazon cart after seeing a link in a Tweet. In another, a laughing father in a park adds some diapers to his cart after seeing the Pampers account tweet about them. In reality, people excited enough about a game to be following that game's Twitter feed have already preordered it. People who need to buy diapers are just going to go buy diapers, not wait for a Twitter account to tell them to. #AmazonCart, like so many other social media features, seems tailored for the service's advertisers and not its users.

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