Facebook is looking to turn its army of business pages into e-commerce sites (F-commerce to be more exact).David Fisch, who runs a newly formed commerce partnerships group at Facebook told Businessweek that the group aims to help retailers set up shop on its pages that allows users to interact while they shop.
To kick-start the initiative, the world’s largest social networking site has dispatched managers to convince over 20 companies to do so.
JC Penney’s Facebook store was one of the fruitful examples that came out of the negotiations. On JC Penney’s Facebook page, the retail giant sells 250,000 items similar to its brick and mortar retail shops.
This initiative isn’t primarily motivated by monetary motives. Facebook doesn’t earn a single penny when users buy items through these F-commerce stores. Instead, Facebook believes that these stores would provide better user experience. Users would then spend more time on Facebook, which naturally leads to higher advertising sales. Similar to Google’s revenue equation, Facebook earns majority of its revenue through ads.
Third party companies have also contributed to the rise of Facebook commerce. Payvment, a software start-up that turns Facebook pages into storefront, has helped to set up 250 Facebook retailers on a daily basis. Alvenda is another social commerce company that helps clients built stores on Facebook. Its clients include, Delta Airline, 1-800-Flowers.com and Hallmark. Alvenda also reported that its clients reached a combined daily sale of $100,000 earlier this month. This amount is small compared to the e-commerce giants. eBay is able to hit about $2,000 worth of sale per second, compared to Alvenda’s, which is only $1.16 per second.
With 500 million users, Facebook can be anything it wants to be. Facebook has morphed into a F-commerce site in this case. At this rate, we would expect many more Facebook business pages turning into retail stores. It does make Internet shopping more social, but just one problem, it might also make Facebook less social as a whole. Imagine being bombarded by sales, stores and promotions updates. It can be a little overwhelming. But I trust Facebook to have already anticipated this problem. We’ll see how F-commerce rolls out to be in the near future.
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