Posts Tagged ‘e-Commerce’

Vidar Brekke , CEO of Social Intent, made a strong and well-supported case yesterday on Social Times that on-Facebook storefronts may not be the wave of the future. Brekke, one of my “go-to” guides for navigating Facebook’s emerging capabilities, such as the Graph API, may be quite wrong.

To me, the evidence points to the appropriateness and rapid rise of “F-commerce.” Read Brekke’s take and mine — and let us know what you think.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.

While guest blogger Vidar Brekke of Social Intent is bullish on Facebook as an e-Commerce facilitator, he’s not sure that on-Facebook storefronts are the wave of the future.

Is Brekke on the mark or underestimating Facebook’s shopping potential?

In 2011, companies will be looking towards social commerce to help boost sales and profits. TurnTo is a company that is making it their mission to prove the power of social interaction to retailers and e-commerce stores, through product sharing and social merchandising.

To aid to consumers who were eager to make luxury purchases without hurting their wallets, Gilt.com was introduced in 2008. Since its inception, a number of other “online sample sites” have sprouted, carrying more than just apparel but home furnishings, travel packages and services. The concept of purchasing designer items within an allotted time at [...]

With embedded shopping, Mertado has created a seamless experience that allows the user to stay within the application they are using while making a purchase. This integration means that Facebook and other social networks could become much more lucrative to game developers and publishers than they are already.

I just got off the phone with Patrick Chanezon, the OpenSocial evangelist over at Google. I will be providing a podcast of our conversation later this week. During our conversation Patrick mentioned that he thinks e-commerce will start playing a larger role in social applications. I’ve written about this before on AllFacebook but for some reason it struck a chord with me this time around.

I keep wondering what incentive Google has to be involved with OpenSocial aside from preventing Facebook from being a dominant player. While developers can use the Adwords service to monetize their applications, this isn’t the best solution. I keep trying to figure out how these sites are going to generate substantially more revenue and the only thing that I can think of at this is point is e-commerce.

Facebook has already announced their intention to let app developers monetize through an e-commerce system but Google has yet to announce anything. While Patrick could not comment on it, it only seems logical for Google to expand Google Wallet to OpenSocial. This will hopefully provide the kick that they need to take on eBay owned PayPal.

While the social networking arms race continues, Google and Facebook will struggle to figure out more effective monetization strategies for these new channels. Google has the luxury of a multi-billion dollar war chest and a growing billion dollar advertising business, not to mention a thoroughly developed payment platform. Facebook has a massive amount of pressure from investors to increase monetization and an incomplete payment system.

As advertisers turn away from social advertising due to the inherent risks in lack of control over user-generated content, the only obvious remaining solution is e-commerce. I think it may be time to spend more time focusing on e-commerce and payment system integration instead of advertising solutions. What do you think? Is e-commerce (or “social commerce”) the future of the social web?