As investors try to come to grips with Facebook’s flailing share price, smart marketers and Facebook’s thought leaders are turning their attention to Social Commerce.
Social Commerce is the term coined to describe the act of buying and selling goods for social media platforms like Facebook. One of the major reasons why Facebook listed at such a high price publicly was that investors were betting on their ability to tap into E-Commerce.
In fact, some high-profile investors started the term “F-commerce” – meaning Facebook Commerce – as they were extremely positive about the potential for Facebook to tap into e-commerce for commercial growth. Now these thoughts are only supported by a recent report that revealed Facebook was testing a “want” button within their code.
While this “want” button is yet to be released, it’s publicly available in the code they share via there API. Upon investigation, it appears that the code is tied to “products” within Facebook. This is the clearest indication yet that Facebook is seriously considering a bid to take the social commerce space in the market.
Considering the number of users they have and the access to data they have, Facebook has all the tools to produce a successful online store. One of the reasons Amazon is so popular is they are able to present products that people want based on data. But Amazon has nowhere near the amount of data that Facebook has access to, making Facebook a logical competitor in the future.
It’s not like businesses aren’t already trying to explore this themselves, with sites like Fab.com, Payvment and BeachMint all making successful forays into Facebook-based e-commerce.
Fab.com has over three million users who share with their friends what they buy on the website – and according to all reports, are profiting greatly from their integration with Facebook.
While BeachMint was the first company to run a live two-hour Facebook-promoted event where they showcased their product and allowed users to buy within a single click. This event attracted over 50,000 users to the site and was the highest-growing sales day in the company’s history.
As we’ve already witnessed, businesses are already starting to use Facebook as an online store to make more sales for their businesses. The big question now is how long until Facebook launches their own online store which will essentially dominate the social commerce marketplace.
