T-commerce: the next e-commerce revolution to “watch”

What is t-commerce, exactly?

If you look up t-commerce (or tcommerce) on a search engine, you’ll get results describing touch commerce (mobile), tablet commerce, Twitter commerce (we’re not joking), and television commerce.

Will the real t-commerce please stand up?

We won’t begin to argue that the other T’s aren’t valid. But on this blog, t-commerce denotes television commerce; anything to do with tablets is m-commerce (mobile commerce) and anything social is social commerce (unless it’s Facebook, which has already earned its own ‘F’).

T-commerce is exactly what you’d expect. It’s the use of television to facilitate transactions over the Internet. Research by PayPal in late 2011 found 49% of TV subscribers have an interest in purchasing goods and services through their television or other “screen” like smartphones and tablets.

From purchases or donations relevant to the programme being watched, through to coupons delivered during television ads, the likelihood is we’ll all have heard about t-commerce before too long. As new technologies emerge and more shows and television-related apps adopt in-programme shopping capabilities, we can expect even more innovation in the future.