As Twitter Wades into Commerce, a Diversified Chirpify is Not Sweating It

Twitter hired a new commerce chief, Nathan Hubbard, to lead the social network in inline commerce – buying and selling within tweets, the company announced earlier this week.

But the pioneer in this space is Portland, Ore.-based Chirpify, and the company’s CEO, Chris Teso, said he sees only positives for his company with this move by Twitter.

“It’s great to see Twitter take commerce seriously,” he told Bank Innovation. “It legitimizes what we’re doing. But at the same time, Twitter is only a small part of what we do.”

Chirpify launched as a service in Twitter in 2011, but recently concluded a $6 million Series A round of funding that will see it expand from its base in social media — Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest — to television, live events, radio and print.

Hubbard, meanwhile, is the former CEO of Ticketmaster, and has been actively involved with social commerce for several years. He recently struck a deal with Facebook to allow Ticketmaster buyers to see where their Facebook friends were sitting at an event.

Teso found it an “interesting choice” that someone from event sales, rather than the brand or retail side, was tapped for this role. “[Hubbard] has said, we’re not going to compete with other platforms but partner,” Teso said. Twitter is entering Amazon and eBay’s space, although Teso does not see the company getting into deep commerce, but rather converting ads in stream — like Chirpify.

“Twitter takes a lot of time, it’s very meticulous,” Teso said of the company’s development process. Selling is not simple, he said. There is the user experience, fulfillment, branding, best practices, account management and more to be managed.

So this won’t happen right away, and in the meantime, Chirpify is diversifying its base to allow in-ad payments wherever there are brands. Time for a name change, maybe?

Twitter has generated an estimated $582 million in ad sales so far this year.