The effort launches as e-retailers gear up for the holiday shopping season.

Once upon a time, Santa Claus had to work for a living, deciphering scribbles on pieces of paper to discern the gift desires of countless children, earning, perhaps, a few dry cookies and some warm milk for his toil. Now, thanks to Amazon.com Inc. and Twitter Inc., the red-suited home invader can lounge back at his North Pole headquarters monitoring tweets to figure out what exactly how much tonnage his reindeers will have to haul this December.

Amazon, the No. 1 online retailer in the Internet Retailer 2014 Top 500 Guide, today said it had enabled online shoppers to craft their Amazon wish lists via Twitter. “Twitter offers Amazon customers a great environment for inspiration and discovery,” says John Yurcisin, director of social at Amazon. “#AmazonWishList makes it easy for people to quickly add holiday gifts, décor or entertaining items tweeted by interesting people, friends, or brands on Twitter to their Amazon Wish List, allowing customers to simply save items to their Wish List and keep on Tweeting.”

According to Amazon, here is how the program works: A consumer who spots a Twitter message that contains an Amazon product link for a product she would like to add to her wish list can include “#AmazonWishList” in the reply to that message; the action adds the product to the consumer’s wish list on Amazon. Consumers who have connected their Amazon accounts with their Twitter accounts will receive a reply tweet from @MyAmazon, along with an e-mail from the e-retailer, to confirm the wish list addition. Other shoppers will receive a reply asking them to connect those two accounts in order to enable the feature.

Amazon says that during the 2013 holiday shopping season, its customers added “seven books and five toys every second to Amazon wish lists.”

The wish feature represents at least the second recent major effort by Amazon to gain sales via Twitter. Last May, Amazon launched a feature that lets a Twitter user who links his Amazon and Twitter accounts add an item to his Amazon.com cart by including the #AmazonCart hashtag in a tweet that includes a link to an Amazon product page. Amazon says a U.K. shopper can add an item to his Amazon.co.uk cart by using the #AmazonBasket hashtag.

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The program launches as Twitter strives to become an even bigger part of e-commerce. Earlier this month, for instance, the social network rolled out a tool called “Look-Alike” targeting that lets marketers direct ads to shoppers who share traits with brands’ customers. Not quite a month ago, Twitter announced a test that lets retailers, including Burberry and The Home Depot Inc., add the Buy button to their tweets. Only a small percentage of Twitter uses will see these posts for now, although that’s likely to increase over time, Twitter says. Last year Twitter worked with American Express to enable AmEx cardholders who link their cards with their Twitter accounts to buy products directly on the microblogging service. And last fall it worked with Starbucks Corp. to launch a digital gift program on the platform.

Amazon, meanwhile, hopes to earn more from shoppers on social media. According to Top500Guide.com, the e-retailer received 4.87% of its web traffic from social networks in 2013, resulting in nearly $537.4 million worth of sales. As of today, Amazon has 1.43 million followers on Twitter.

Going by the percentage of traffic it gets from social media, Amazon ranks No. 187 in the Social Media 500, an Internet Retailer research-and-ranking guide. The leader of that category, BucketFeet, which sells canvas shoes, received 68% of its 2013 traffic from social networks, though that translated into only $100,000 in web sales.

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