So far, pretty much all the news of e-commerce stores setting up shop on Facebook involve the use of specialized e-commerce applications.

They are missing out on the blogshop types of stores on Facebook, that is the stores that leverage on the free-ness of the platform and which DO NOT USE applications that require payment.

(This notion suggests that a necessary characteristic to define blogshops is their COST-FREE aspect).

Secondly, it is interesting to note that blogshops are trying to do exactly what this article describes as expensive, slow and risky, ie building a shopping site outside of Facebook (or a C2C online market site like eBay, Etsy, etc).

In this sense, blogshops represent a shopping channel that operates outside of the mainstream/established systems.  Their owners undertake the difficult tasks of building the whole system from scratch mainly because they want to leverage on the COST-FREE benefits of a blog platform.  Collectively, they have thus far been able to circumvent many of the obstacles by creating a self-supportive eco-system comprised of various free  social media forms to effect a unique type of e-commerce.

At the same time, this article also confirms the inevitability of blogshops becoming or complementing  Facebook stores in the future as the giant social network continues to gain mass.

From: http://socialmediatoday.com/mattambrose/272418/why-facebook-could-dominate-next-generation-ecommerce

Why Facebook Could Dominate the Next Generation of Ecommerce

    Posted February 22, 2011 by Matt Ambrose

Day by day, Facebook’s tentacles continue to spread and pull in more of the web into its domain. Facebook Deals marked its step into the world of discounts and group buying. Now its got its sights set on the wider world of ecommerce. And its competitors need to be afraid. Very afraid.

The integrated Facebook store

Brands and businesses have been using Facebook to boost traffic to their websites for some time. Tesco earned £2 million last year through their Facebook fan page. All they had to do was post links in their newsfeed and then sit back and let users post ‘Likes’ and comments to share their offers virally.


But posting links isnt the only way to sell on Facebook. There’s now a steady stream of brands and businesses setting up shop and selling directly, without users having to leave the site.

The popular fashion retailer ASOS was the first to get the ball rolling, last month, with a fully transactional Facebook store. French Connection and Dove now have plans to follow suit. These are just the first pioneers of the many brands and businesses that are likely to follow.

Even the mighty Amazon isn’t too big to ignore Facebook’s potential. It recently bought Quidsi to help it launch Facebook stores of its own, so it can use the site as a sales opporunity rather than a direct competitor.

A social shopping experience that’s difficult to replicate

The reasons for creating an online store on Facebook are obvious: it has 30 million users in the UK alone, offers can be spread virally and it’s where people are spending large chunks of their online time.

Neither does creating an online store have to be expensive. Applications, such as Storenvy and ShopIgniter, make it relatively simple to add a store tab to your Facebook page.

Perhaps the key reason why creating Facebook store is a no brainer is because Facebook delivers a social shopping experience that is very difficult to replicate.

Trying to build a social shopping site outside of Facebook would be an expensive, slow and risky challenge. Not only do you have to attract users in their millions, but you also have to persuade them to start spending as much time on the site as they do on Facebook.

The fact is that Facebook has such a massive head start on its rivals (with 600 million users and counting) that it could dominate the world of ecommerce, let alone social shopping, in the years to come.