A couple of months ago, Facebook internalized social commerce by providing users with the ability to send real gifts (not digital as in the old days) to friends.
Here’s how it works:
Click on the “gifts” icon in a friend’s birthday announcement or visit their timeline and look for it there, and you can send a gift to your friend. He or she will be notified immediately and can choose an address where the gift should be shipped.
Okay, so you knew that. But did you know that Amazon and Cafepress have followed suit? The funny thing is that both rely on Facebook (at least in part) to supply a list of friends.
According to Internet Retailer, Amazon’s new feature, called Friends & Family Gifting, allows users to organize their gift lists, find gift ideas and receive reminders of their friends’ birthdays and special occasions, as well as share gift lists via Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or e-mail.
Late last month, online retailer Cafepress launched its own gifting program, Likeable Gifts, that uses the same protocol. Read more
Facebook recently announced a limited gift service in September which allows users to send real gifts to friends and family directly from the site.
Users can choose a gift as well as a card to send to friends on Facebook. The gift will post on the friend’s timeline or can be sent privately. Members that are sent gifts can unwrap them virtually before receiving the real gift at their address.
Gifts can be sent from birthday reminders or from a friend’s timeline.
Facebook also gives the option of paying right away or later as well as letting gift receivers exchange for something else.
The social network has since added hundreds of gifts and new retail partners including babyGap, Fab, Brookstone, Dean & Deluca, L’Occitane, Lindt, ProFlowers, Random House, Inc. and NARS Cosmetics.
Users also have the option to gift TV shows and music with subscriptions to Hulu Plus, Rdio and Pandora.
The gift service will continue to roll out to Facebook members globally over the next few weeks.
While Facebook has made several attempts in convincing brands to accept the “F-Commerce,” idea, the newest gift service could actually prove successful for the company.
“The prospect of a full scale rollout of Facebook Gifts could be a real shot in the arm for Facebook and its drive to convince brands to commit to the concept of F-commerce,” said Richard Britton, managing director at Cloudsense.
“Even before its IPO Facebook was working to make the site more palatable for retailers and brands as a potential sales channel. Retailers are keen to use Facebook to tap into its massive market of one billion users to drive sales and develop another revenue stream, they just need convincing. It remains a catch 22 situation: brands need to get involved for the system to take off yet many won’t commit to the platform until they see success stories from other brands. If Facebook can demonstrate that ‘Gifts’ does indeed appeal to consumers, then Facebook, its shareholders, consumers and brands will ultimately win.”
If the social network’s gift platform can win over brands then it could prove to be a lucrative way of bringing in money for the firm while proving to investors it can make money in other ways than only advertising.
“Brands will need to adapt to the innovation by removing silos between business systems to deliver a more granular view of the customer that can be the basis for a long term relationship. Brands are still to be 100 per cent convinced about the overall success of F-commerce, but the introduction of new and usable tools like Facebook Gifts could go a long way to towards tipping the balance.”
This post originally appeared on ‘Computer Business Review‘
In the future, the number of contracts between buyers and sellers concluded on Facebook will increase. In the near future, sales through Facebook are even predicted to surpass those through Amazon.
This is according to Nerushka Deosaran, associate at Norton Rose SA, an international law firm.
Speaking at ITWeb’s Social Media Summit, Deosaran said social media is changing the commercial landscape. She also predicted that social commerce will be the next trend to follow e-commerce.
According to Deosaran, social commerce is the conducting of business over social media networks. This includes using social networks to trade, for advertising and marketing, to offer promotions and competitions, as well as accumulating likes and followers on Facebook and Twitter, respectively. Read more
So you’ve gotten lots of “likes” and “tweets” for your online store, but business has not really improved that much. Now what? If this were, say, a Soprano family enterprise, you could cozy up to your enemy’s enemy, knowing they could probably be turned into a friend. Instead, it’s just another fraught day at the online store.
Improving business is tied to knowing, not just your friends (and enemies), but their friends…and those friends’ friends. The key for online merchants is to understand both the social networks and online social activities of your site visitors and customers, says the executive of Chicago start-up The Echo System, which focuses on growing “return on social” (ROS), short for “return on social media.”
Sharing on Social Media
ROS riffs off of the phrase “return on investment,” (ROI) that perennial worry of all business owners. And, just like ROI, you need to know ROS to figure out how to improve the bottom line.
Social (at least in the online context) means a lot more these days than just “liking” and “friending” people, all the while tweeting about a one-day-only sale. For instance, it can mean examining the friends of those folks who “like” your store (they all have some), and what those friends of friends like, and whether your tweets are being re-tweeted, and by whom, says Lance Neuhauser, CEO of The Echo System. Read more
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. today is playing hero to parents and villain to children naïve enough to think summer never ends. A new feature created by the retail chain’s@WalMartLabs research arm enables teachers to digitally submit their classroom supply lists, and online shoppers to buy those items via a new site, classrooms.walmart.com. The effort, set to include a mobile element in coming weeks, launched today as part of the retailer’s larger back-to-school shoppingpush.
Shoppers visiting that site can find their school via a search box displayed near the top; consumers can search by school name and state. If a school or teacher has submitted a supply list—essentially, the e-commerce version of a service long offered by many Wal-Mart and other bricks-and-mortar stores that asked teachers to drop off their lists—the search calls forth those lists. (A button on the site’s front page encourages teachers to digitally submit their lists.) Read more
Facebook is rumored to be testing a Want button that would be similar in look and function to its now ubiquitous Like button. The feature was spotted by developer Tom Waddington, who published the button’s code on his blog.
Such buttons already exist — but they have been developed by third-party brands to serve retailers eager to maximize exposure on Facebook’s Timeline. One example is a buttondeveloped by a company called “Want.” It counts among its users The Sharper Image, Ron Jon, and DNA Footwear.
That is not what this new Want button is — at least as it is portrayed on Waddington’s site. Rather, it seems as though it would be a native Facebook feature, not requiring special opt-in from consumers to install or use.
Certainly a Want button follows the Facebook model of providing short but powerful prompts to users to take personal actions, such as Like or Comment, said Rich Hanley, director ofQuinnipiac University’s graduate journalism program. Read more
Payvment, a social e-commerce platform, is launching a new Facebook Ad buying service today that integrates unique transaction-based data to provide more relevant targeting for brands and advertisers. Payvment is developing what CEO and founder Christian Taylor calls a “taste graph” by determining how people are interconnected around products and improving upon the efficacy od Facebook Ads based on the makeup of their social graph.
“We look at ourselves as a social commerce research and development company, trying to figure out the relationship between products and people,” Taylor told ClickZ in a phone interview.
The company developed a targeting algorithm that will analyze a seller’s inventory and determine which types of users are most likely to purchase those products based on proprietary transaction data that Payvment has collected from more than 40 million Facebook users to date.
Facebook’s social graph is not always the most efficient way for brands to facilitate discovery and actually sell products, Taylor said. Although many Facebook users have friends that number in the hundreds, if not thousands, “on a product discovery level, you really don’t have that much in common,” he said. Social commerce is about so much more than simply clicking a “like” button or using Facebook’s self-serve ad tool to select targeting parameters, he continued. Read more
A sputtering economy isn’t slowing the growth of e-commerce. In fact, new data from comScore shows $44 billion in business now moving through U.S. e-commerce channels, up 17 percent from a year ago. More, the last three quarters show accelerating year-over-year growth.
Of course, e-commerce is a beneficiary of economic belt tightening, but there are much bigger factors at play. Economic pressures are combining with technology-driven disruptions to create a perfect storm of online opportunity. These disruptions are nothing new; what is new is the pace at which they are happening. Big, established retail players are having trouble adapting to this accelerating pace of change, while nimble start-ups feed and thrive on it.
I see three megatrends driving e-commerce change that I call the Three P’s: Personalization, Pinterest and iPad (well, iPad almost starts with a P). Together they ensure that U.S. e-commerce will continue to experience double-digit growth and pass the $100 billion mark in less than five years. Read more
The pieces are in place for Facebook’s IPO next week—not only has the company set its stock price range and updated its Q1 numbers, it has also attempted to de-risk the biggest perceived risk in the first draft of its S-1: exposure to mobile competition. Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion, which ostensibly will help it approach mobile social interaction in a more engaging way. But it hasn’t done anything to address its exposure to other addictive consumer applications that could whittle away at its users’ engagement over time. Namely, the most risky applications involve social commerce, and the elephant in the room as it relates to physical goods, not virtual goods, is Pinterest.
There are rumors that Facebook will announce a major eCommerce move just before its IPO in May. That is still possible, but given that its social commerce brainchild, Beacon, flopped in 2007, an unproven eCommerce-related endeavor branded by Facebook would be a hugely risky move. Unlike its answer to potential competition in the mobile space, Facebook is leaving eCommerce risk unanswered one way or the other. Read more
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, you have probably already heard about the new sensation that’s been spreading across the internet like wildfire – Pinterest.
What is Pinterest?
Pinterest is a new social network whose main feature is its ability to act like a digital scrapbook, bulletin board, or wish list. While there are several other websites that offer extensive image sharing capabilities, Pinterest has developed this as its main competitive edge against other more popular social networks. In fact, it has been so successful in carving out a niche for itself that in two short years after launching its private beta, it has skyrocketed. It is now ranked among the top 10 social sites, and is estimated to be worth around 500 million USD.
The company was conceived a while back in 2009. It officially launched its invitation-only beta in 2010. Right from the start, Pinterest’s client base has always been mostly composed of women. Its first frequent visitors were mostly interested in the recipes and stylish home decors they found on the site. This core group of people then spread the word to their friends, who in turn told theirs, and so on. Pinterest owes its marketing success to the quality of its content and the power of referrals. On July 2011, only 13 months after its launch, the company had already its 1 millionth unique visitor. This rapid growth has often given it the reputation of being the fastest growing internet site in history. In truth however, it is only second to yet another internet sensation – formspring. Read more
A couple of months ago, Facebook internalized social commerce by providing users with the ability to send real gifts (not digital as in the old days) to friends.
