MasterCard Experimenting with Tap-and-Buy Technology

MasterCard Inc. (Purchase, N.Y.) is expected to announce a partnership with Condé Nast Publications (New York) that will allow digital readers to instantly buy items described in an article or in an ad by tapping a shopping cart icon on the page.

The New York Times reports the partnership, called ShopThis, will begin in the November tablet edition of Wired magazine, which is due out on Oct. 15, 2013.

Condé Nast also publishes Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Architectural Digest, GQ and Bon Appetit. Wired publisher Howard Mittman believes the technology will provide an enormous benefit to advertisers, but Condé Nast said it plans to study Wired’s experience before deciding whether to expand the program to its other magazines.

The venture will start with about a dozen products in the magazine’s “Gadget Lab” section and in an “advertorial” holiday gift guide. Clicking on the shopping cart icon will initiate a purchase through Rakuten.com, an e-commerce site, using the company’s MasterPass mobile payments system.

Garry Lyons, MasterCard’s chief innovation officer, said the company has developed its click-through shopping technology to be “digitally agnostic,” meaning it may be made available across several digital platforms, including television, video and movies.

“We believe any device is potentially a device of commerce, enabling the user to buy what they want from within the content without having to leave the content,” he said. “There is no reason why ShopThis couldn’t be rolled out when watching a movie or video. You see an actor who has a nice shirt on, you activate ShopThis. This is an example of incubation where we move quietly, test, learn, iterate.”