When it comes to social commerce, it has been estimated that it will reach $30 Billion in the next five years. The question that arises here is how this became possible? If we take Facebook commerce in consideration, it just amounts to liking product pages. However, there are seven dimensions in total that drive Facebook commerce. And this is precisely what makes up the ‘F-Commerce Ecosphere’.
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What is F-Commerce Ecospehere?
In order to find out about F-Commerce Ecospehere let us have a look at the following things.
Commerce Done in Facebook.com
F-stores have come to be known as the latest business doing methods ever since the first in-Facebook retail transaction was done in 2009. since then a number of businesses have also come up with their own shop tabs on their Facebook pages. Theses tabs either redirect to the main website or support real-money shopping right on the page.
Another interesting thing is the Facebook ads and sponsored stories. These are basically advertising options or messages that appear in the sidebar and also in the News Feed. Then there is Facebook credits. This is actually a virtual currency that can be redeemed for various digital products like movies, apps and games. There are also virtual goods inside games like character enhancements, extra lives etc. you can also use Facebook Credits for micro payments inside mobile apps.
Consider the following situation. Zynga sells 38,000 virtual items every second. Clearly this is quite popular with consumers. In fact, in the year 2010, virtual goods revenue of Zynga topped 575 million. Moreover, this year, the virtual goods industry is expected to make a total of 1.2 Billion. You can easily purchase Facebook Credits gifts cards online or from Supermarket checkout aisles. This is not all. They can also be earned as loyalty incentives. With Shopkick mobile app, customers can easily earn reward points for various tings like check-ins etc. if you have been relying too much on Netflix, it is certainly time to move on. This is because you can also redeem your Facebook credits for movie rentals as well.
Open Graph Facebook Commerce
Let us now talk about open graph Facebook Commerce. Let us first talk about Facebook Mobile Platforms. With Facebook mobile apps, it is now possible to have status updates on the go that push to Requests, notifications, Timeline and News Feed.
With Facebook Open Graph Beta, you can forget about ‘Like’ or ‘Share’ buttons and simply move on to incorporate new set of things like ‘I Want’, ‘I bought’ etc. you can also push these actions through Timeline, Newsfeed and Ticker. Then there is this thing called Facebook Connect. It also offers many ecommerce applications.
It is time to talk about Facebook Social plug-ins. These plug-ins let users to do functions related to Facebook on their website. For example- a website can have buttons like ‘Like’, ‘Share’, ‘Recommend’ etc. It can also have comment boxes and fan widgets.
Another really interesting thing that Facebook offers is Facebook Places and Location Tab. You might be surprised to know that Facebook is steadily cataloging physical location data for every Facebook business page. It is possible to integrate this data online. For instance, Walmart makes use of the Zipcode to personalize its Pages with offers, new products and events. Another interesting use of the location info is Ticketmaster’s Interactive Seat Map. This allows you to locate your friends’ position in a theater!
Although it would be too soon to say whether anyone can make good money by selling physical goods through Facebook, but at the same time, the fact that can not be denied is that many brands have been able to connect with fans in a good way using Facebook. What can be said with certitude is that there indeed is a lot of opportunity to play around with the social marketing. And for this, you do not even need to use all the aspects of the ecosystem. With time, it will only get better.
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Great post guys!
There’s no doubt that F-commerce is the next step in the e-Commerce evolution! We at StoreYa see the daily growth in merchants.