This kind of platform allows the E-commerce sellers to create product pages on Facebook that customer can “like”. When they do “like” the items, they appear in their Facebook news feed as well as on the brand’s e-commerce site. From there Facebook members can also use a widget to recommend the product to friends. And from there, the chain of friends of friends who find and enjoy using the product and this type of social media interaction has no boundaries.
In this process, Shopfans let the consumers to make secure purchase transactions right away through Facebook without compromising any security issues and privacy. Moreover, ShopFans was built wholly as a native Facebook Platform application, instead of a ‘store in a widget,’ which let the brands for the first time to tie directly into all the social plumbing of Facebook, including News Feed stories promoting “Wish lists”, “I want this!”, “Likes”, “Shout outs”, gift registries, private and exclusive sales, and more. This is the industry’s first ever fully secure, complete, and native Facebook e-commerce application, which not only allows brands to chat directly with its fans, but also allows fans to virally promote and share the brand’s message and products, all done through the social ‘hooks’ within Facebook.
So Let’s see the use of this for e-tailers across the Web. First, it gives more access for consumers to brand’s products, not just brand information and coupons, everyday where consumers are spending a large chunk of their time. In fact, Forester Research’s Q4 2009 U.S. Retail Executive Online Survey stated that 64% of respondents named social commerce as one of the top 5 investment priorities in 2010. And another recent report from Foresee Results showed that Facebook is the most effective way to turn chatter into sales. According to the report, of the 69% of online shoppers who are social media users, 56% have also chosen to “friend,” “follow,” or “subscribe to” at least one store brand on Facebook. And 49% of those who follow brands through Facebook want to hear about deals, and 45% want to browse products. That is a large market share when you consider there are 400 million current Facebook users, most which sign in at least 1x per day.
Those are pretty powerful numbers to backup what many large brands are already doing- expanding their cross-channel marketing platform to include sales channels inside social media. This is just the beginning though, look for many more changes to come.