News broke yesterday that Amazon and Twitter have joined up to provide a brand new shopping service, all within the cosy confines of your Twitter feed. In the latest venture to drive ecommerce business and social media closer together, consumers can now simply tweet a product in to their Amazon basket using #AmazonBasket.

If you’re interested in testing it out, simply log in to your Amazon account and link your Twitter account through your social settings. Then it’s as easy as replying to any tweet with an Amazon product link in it, just be sure to include #AmazonBasket (or #AmazonCart, the US hashtag, also works here). This adds it straight to your shopping basket.

While it’s nifty and we can see how it could develop – think of the convenience of using a hashtag on any product, across any platform – we can’t help but question whether the Twitter user wants to shop using hashtags? Does it just complicate a service that just recently rolled out a new design format in a bid to become more mainstream?

The FT has reported that Twitter will not profit directly from Amazon sales but that they hope it will encourage other brands to spend on advertising through the site. The partnership is working towards Amazon's aim to remove friction between the shopping process and to eliminate switching between apps. Amazon also hopes that this new way of shopping will drive impulse buying.

We're interested to see how this new feature will impact on Twitter, a traditionally news-driven stream as opposed to a commercial stream. We're also interested to see how users and marketeers will adopt this new feature and whether people will want to reveal their shopping habits on social media.

Watch Amazon's promotional video to find out more: