Facebook has recently launched a number of new initiatives in a bid to increase their domination of the web.
One of the one’s that has come to the fore is the ability for organisations with fan pages to display and sell products via Facebook.
Fashion brand Levi’s has just launched an elegant Facebook-powered social shopping feature called Friends Store (http://store.levi.com/) that uses Facebook’s new social plugins – notably the ‘Like’ button (the Like button takes a cue from the new YouTube, which has replaced ratings with ‘likes’).
Basically, the “Friends Store” on Levi’s e-commerce site showcases only products recommended by Facebook friends, and allows you to invite friends to co-browse the store . This enables personalised recommendations from people you like, and those with similar tastes.
At the moment, customers must still pay for the items via the retailer’s web site. However, some companies have begun testing “Facebook credits” via their Facebook/f-commerce pages. This is still very much in a trial period, but facebook credits will work similar to a pre-paid debit card; thus eliminating the need for credit card authorisations for every transaction. This will make life a lot easier for both the buyer and the seller. By making the purchase experience smoother, this will undoubtedly drive sales via Facebook in time.
Therefore, this new development is something you will now need to implement into your e-commerce strategy. Peer-to-peer recommendation is hugely popular in any case on the social web; and the ability to pay for goods with Facebook credits, will open the way for impulse purchases.
Take a look at your products. Many of you will already have company facebook pages, as well as followers. How can you utilise this to your advantage? F-commerce is something you should be able to move right into, as an addendum from your existing e-commerce strategies.
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I have to say that Facebook still has a long way to go in order to turn their visitors into buyers. 99.99% of people who visit facebook do so to interact with their friends rather than buy stuff from advetisers.
I think the way it will change will be when facebook introducers more sophisticated tracking of users’ behaviour so that the adverts can be targetted more and more to the person’s preferences.