E-commerce Retailers Add Facebook To Sales Channels


by Manish Patel, CEO Where 2 Get It, Inc. - Date: 2010-06-16 - Word Count: 488 Share This!

Recently, Levi's announced it's new Facebook plug-in, powered by Open Graph, that integrates shopping on Levi's with Facebook's platform for one of the first fully integrated e-commerce partnerships through Open Graph. The platform allows Levi's to create product pages on Facebook that customers can "like". When they do "like" the items, they appear in his/her Facebook news feed as well as on the brand's e-commerce site. From there Facebook members can also use a widget to recommend the product to friends. And from there, the chain of friends of friends who find and enjoy using this type of brand/social media interaction has no boundaries.

Let's take this one step further. In a press release Adgregate Markets announced this, "...Adgregate Markets, the leader in transactional advertising and distributed commerce solutions, announced the public availability of ShopFans during Ad:Tech's keynote presentation "White Hot Tech Companies and Why They Matter," marking the first truly social shopping application built entirely within Facebook. Utilizing the world's most secure social commerce technology, ShopFans allows consumers to make secure purchase transactions directly in Facebook without compromising security and privacy. Moreover, ShopFans was built entirely as a native Facebook Platform application, instead of a 'store in a widget,' which allows brands for the first time to tie directly into all of the social plumbing of Facebook, including News Feed stories promoting "Wish lists", "I want this!", "Likes", "Shout outs", gift registries, private and exclusive sales, and more. This is the industry's first ever fully secure, complete, and native Facebook e-commerce application, which not only allows brands to chat directly with its fans, but also allows fans to virally promote and share the brand's message and products, all done through the social 'hooks' within Facebook." ~adgregate.com

So what does all this mean for e-tailers across the Web? First, it means more access for consumers to brand's products, not just brand information and coupons, everyday where consumers are spending a large chunk of their time. In fact, Forrester Research's Q4 2009 U.S. Retail Executive Online Survey stated that 64% of respondents named social commerce as one of the top 5 investment priorities in 2010. And another recent report from Foresee Results indicated that Facebook is the most effective way to turn chatter into sales. According to the report, of the 69% of online shoppers who are social media users, 56% have also chosen to "friend," "follow," or "subscribe to" at least one store brand on Facebook. And 49% of those who follow brands through Facebook want to hear about deals, and 45% want to browse products. That's a large market share when you consider there are 400 million current Facebook users, the majority of which sign in at least 1x per day.

Those are pretty powerful numbers to backup what many large brands are already doing- expanding their cross-channel marketing platform to include sales channels inside social media. This is just the beginning though, look for many more changes to come.

Related Tags: online retailers, social media sales, facebook ecommerce, facebook friend, online search marketing, levis, levis social media on facebook

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