Social Commerce

While everyone is talking about Tumblr’s acquisition as a one-man show at $1.1 billion, Yahoo! paid $3.5 billion for Geocities back in 1999 with only 19 million uniques compared to Tumblr’s 300 million uniques, so, in some sense, Tumblr is a good deal. While this latest acquisition seems like a big one, it’s also symbolic of what internet traffic is worth now in scale and shows that social blogging networks are not just traffic platforms, but strategic internet real estate. Tumblr, where anyone can blog and share others’ blogs, has also become mainstream, so is everyone blogging now? Is that the future of consumerism?

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Google+ shares are more valuable to merchants than referrals from Twitter or Facebook, according to an analysis of $5 million worth of online purchases that came through the social commerce platform Addshoppers.com.

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8coupons, the go-to place for local deals, has scoured the kingdom of local commerce and defined the “Houses” of local commerce in a truly majestic chart. Notable inclusions include the myriad of options for virtual wallets and the ubiquity Apple-led operations. Below that, we included links to all of the business mentioned.

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This week we saw many April Fools’ jokes from companies on blogs and social media channels, followed new movers and shakers in the “task space,” and discovered new apps for getting noticed when we’re angry.

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American Express and Twitter struck a deal yesterday to allow consumers to buy select products without leaving the Twitter stream. But Chirpify has been doing that for a year.

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The future of social commerce is not in traffic referrals from Facebook, Twitter, or even Pinterest, but in socially enabled e-commerce sites like Fab, say researchers at 8th Bridge. In the 2012 Social Commerce IQ Retail report, released today, research showed that the most successful internet retailers combine branding on social networks with social functionality within their own websites.

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Vineloop, a social recommendations app for iOS, launched an update today that rejiggers its user experience to focus on the trusted recommendations system that the company think sets it apart.

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Commerce is something of a challenge for social networks to implement, but a third party that has already made it work on Twitter is now looking to expand into other markets. Chirpify today announced that it will extend its in-stream payment system to photo-sharing app Instagram. With a PayPal account and the right hashtags, users can now buy, sell, donate, or make a payment without leaving Instagram.

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The mobile cab-hailing company Uber announced Tuesday that it has shut down its yellow cab service in New York, but will keep the town car service running.

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In a recent survey, more than one third of respondents claimed that social content changed their minds about something they intended to buy. Recommendations from friends and consumer or expert reviews were only part of that equation. Shoppers now expect a lot more help from brands while they’re shopping online.

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