Two Good Comments of F-commerce or E-commerce

miaperry wrote:

Facebook is already directly responsible for billions of dollars of 3rd party commerce transactions resulting in its social plugins and Open Graph API.
There are great examples for F-commerce campaigns like the launch of Heinz ‘Get Well’ Soup cans: 4 weeks, 2,127 sales – 1 sale per 8 fans – and a 200% (32,810) increase in Facebook ‘Likes’. We at StoreYa (http://www.StoreYa.com), see an enormous traction, there’s an amazing daily growth of merchants, creating their own Facebook shops. There’s no doubt that F-commerce is the next step in the eCommerce evolution, but it will take some time.
Duplicating your eCommerce store to Facebook will not do the trick..You must provide the merchants with engagement tools, such as: Fans-firsts, Fans exclusive deals & discounts, this adds an important added value to the social shopping experience.
Mia

Apr 05, 2012 9:14am EDT  --  Report as abuse

CharlesNicholls wrote:

The big challenge for Facebook is that while it may have lots of traffic, people don’t go there to shop. Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research, refers to this as “like trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar.” You can always use exclusive incentives to get people to shop on Facebook, but sooner or later you need to ask yourself whether this makes sense. The same promotions can be used to drive traffic to the ecommerce store just as effectively, where the buyer will most likely spend more than they would on Facebook. Until evidence emerges that Facebook storefronts are additive and create incremental sales, they are doomed to failure.
Where f-commerce has a definite role to play is where the product being sold is inherently a social activity: Gaming, entertainment, travel, music etc all spring to mind. Equally it’s a great venue for launching products or creating promotional buzz.
I’ve blogged about this here http://seewhy.com/blog/2012/02/21/facebook-commerce/. In particular I think the bigger opportunity than f-commerce is to make ecommerce more social, and the Social Graph enables exactly that. Adoption and use of it is in its infancy, but it is spreading steadily.
What we should be thinking more about is how we can make shopping inherently more social, rather than cannibalizing ecommerce sales with promotions just to promote a different storefront.