Soon You'll be Buying Sneakers Through Facebook Messenger
When dropped the , they did so through Facebook Messenger at the social giant’s F8 developer conference. With little surrounding info, the novel release seemed a stunt, a gimmick to make headlines, but it’s emerged that the Kyries were the first fruit born of a larger partnership between Nike and Facebook.
Conference punters bought the Kyrie 4s using Messenger’s augmented reality upgrade. To see the shoe, people chatted the SNKRS’ Messenger bot, added a few basketball-related emojis to ‘unlock’ the release and were greeted with a pair of floating sneakers to view before purchasing. While similar to the technology SNKRS use to fight bots by allowing people to ‘hunt’ for releases, Messenger’s application lowers barriers by offering the service to Facebook’s billion-something users.
The partnership is in its infancy, but since Facebook’s motto is to ‘move fast and break things’, you can bet that this new way of buying sneakers will proliferate in 2018.