Magento provides e-commerce platforms to small and medium sized businesses. The reason I am discussing it in this blog, is that we have a number of clients, for whom we have built Magento e-commerce sites. Some of Magento’s most prestigious clients include Ford and Swatch.

The idea behind eBay’s decision is that they want to merge Magento with the company’s own open source, online retailing platform X.Commerce. Precisely how X.Commerce will work, and what part Magento has to play in it will only be revealed in October during eBay’s X.Commerce Innovate Conference.

As far as we are concerned, we think eBay’s reasoning is sound. By buying Magento, eBay can marry this up with previous acquisitions such as Paypal, to offer a turnkey ecommerce solution, from hosting to payment processing to mobile. Mobile is a large growth area, and the leading players are staking a lot on it’s potential.

eBay now has a strong suite of enterprise-class ecommerce developer tools, through which they could offer large retailers help with building their own storefronts along with mobile and social commerce.

Social Networks

When the craze first started, we all frantically sought out friends past and present. Remember Friends Reunited? That seems like the steam age already, but it was in reality, less than a decade ago. And then Facebook. We quickly formed a network of friends.

Not really knowing what we were going to do with this new network, we followed the herd nevertheless. A competitive element seeped in…I have more friends than him or her. Our instinctive curiosity could be satisfied through checking out other profiles, ex girlfriends etc. Social networks also gave us a great sense of empowerment..shall I or shan’t I accept their friend request.

But then most hit a brick wall. We literally run out of friends to invite, things to share etc. We get bored..we try to delete our Facebook accounts..only to reinstate them promising ourselves to waste less time on social networks as a whole, in the future.

Interest Networks

The brick wall having been reached, where do we go? We have all of our friends in our network. There is nowhere to go. So we turn to interests. Online dating sites have been grouping people by interests for years. Now we venture forth to make new connections based upon interest groups and conversations via social media, that we want to be part of. Twitter is the modern day internet forum. But its ability to harness the information of people..their interests, their background, professional profiles etc, makes Twitter nothing short of manna from heaven for brands.

Brand Networks

Research.ly are clearly on top of this game. They work with brands to determine what people are saying about the brand, who is steering the conversation…a Twitter search engine if you like.

All this is about is knowing our customers. The more we know about them through “listening” and research ( not an inquisition – a lot of the relevant information is on profiles/bios and in the conversations) the better brands can connect and engage.

This is a big leap from pushing out general marketing messages!

Social Commerce set to grow in 2011

Asos , a darling of the online retail scene in the UK, has now launched a fully transactional Facebook shop. This is due to open at the end of January, and represents a significant step in social commerce. It will be one of the best known brands in the UK, to allow customers to buy goods without leaving Facebook.

Eliminating clicks will increase sales

In the past, brands have used third-party providers or simply used Facebook as a shopfront, attracting customers, and then leading them back to the main site to complete the transaction.

Many industry experts now feel that this will be the big growth area for 2011.

From our standpoint, this makes sense for a whole host of reasons. Primarily, you go where your customers are. So Facebook is an absolute must for any brand. A quick glance at Asos on Facebook, shows they have 393, 770 followers. That represents a huge number of potential brand advocates and actively engaged customers or prospects.

Make it easy for the customer

In the time of Web 2.0 a fully operational Facebook store, with all the sharing apps that go with it, will encourage collaboration and sharing among followers like never before. Instant real-time feedback from friends will be a great stimulant for impulse purchases.

Furthermore, reduced clicks should increase sales. No more having to go back to the main site to buy something you saw on Facebook. This significantly facilitates customers in the buying process; which can only be a good thing, from an ASOS shareholder’s perspective!

The ASOS facebook app is managed by UsableNet; they also do the mobile app for the company. Check out their site..it’s an impressive client portfolio to say the least!