By: Chris Richards, via – Fanpage Toolkit
Social Commerce is Young, But Primed for Growth
Introduced in 2007, the notion of social commerce, or an online storefront fueled by social networks, is still relatively new to the social media landscape. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find an average Facebook user who has completed a commercial transaction within the constraints of Facebook itself. Though, with Facebook users spending 700 billion minutes per month engaging within the platform, the potential value for brands that are able to drive transactions within Facebook’s environment is huge.
As it stands, social commerce, or more specifically, “f-commerce,” can be divided into four categories:
- On-site selling facilitated by Facebook plugins
- Selling initiated on Facebook
- Selling completed on Facebook
- Selling through iFrames and Facebook apps
On-site selling facilitated by Facebook likes and shares has been common practice among traditional commerce sites seeking to “socialize” their buying process. Scalable e-commerce platforms like Magento and Zen Cart function well as standalone website marketplaces, though, companies using them often lack the social integration that could drive sales to the next level. The growth of e-commerce platforms, like Magento, is showing little sign of slowing, and by the end of 2010, they were found to be serving over 80,000+ active stores across the Internet.
| E-Commerce Platform |
2009 Results |
2010 Results |
Change |
| eBay Stores |
N/A |
100M+ |
N/A |
| Magento[1] |
32,000+ merchants |
80,000+ merchants |
+250% |
| Shopify[2] |
6,626 active stores |
11,323 active stores |
+70% |
| ZenCart |
N/A |
1.8M+ |
N/A |
eBay’s market place service is the largest e-commerce platform available to customers. With an overall user base of 100 million, it is estimated that 10% of eBay users are also marketplace subscribers[3]. The good news behind those numbers? Overall eBay marketplace revenue was up 11%. Within marketplaces the GMV growth rates as of April 2011 were:
- Overall GMV – 8% y/y
- US GMV – 10% y/y
- International GMV – 6%
When looking at the US, eBay’s GMV growth rate came pretty much in-line with e-commerce for the first time in years.[4]
Facebook store apps and basic storefronts that utilize the built in iFrames feature have been successfully integrated into some large fan pages through tools like BigCommerce, Storefront Social, and Payvment. More basically, companies have found success creating unique photo albums to display their products in a more natural light, and as a way to meet consumer demand for ways to share products and buying experiences with their friends across social networks. Essentially, without one, unified, system of social sharing across ecommerce platforms, the trend has been slow to catch on and keep up with other more popular types of social media interaction.
[3] According to eBay sales representative
[4] http://ebaystrategies.blogs.com/ebay_strategies/2011/04/digging-into-ebays-q1-2011-results.html
Finally, according to current trends, where companies stand to gain the most is through commerce transacted completely within Facebook. All other social commerce options drive users away from the comfortable and unified environment of Facebook. The small disconnect between making users open a new tab or travel to a new site can mean the difference between making or losing a sale. The impact of a tool that could fully integrate the buying process into Facebook would be enormous, as a recent study by JWT found that 48% of Facebook users between the ages of 20-33 would like to see an option to buy products directly on Facebook.
With this in mind, a tool that could successfully integrate the social commerce transaction process directly into Facebook could see great success. The newly released Fanpage Toolkit will do just that. It promises to empower users to create, promote, market and sell their products and services completely within the Facebook ecosystem. The platform provides all the essential tools that businesses, brands, organizations/non-profits, artists, bands and public figures, as well as individual users, need to create and manage their own high-impact Facebook page environments completely within the Facebook ecosystem.
The Competitive Landscape
The creation of a storefront within Facebook does not alone equate to social commerce. Just as one’s personal experience shopping in a traditional store is defined by more than simply picking up items and buying them, social commerce is comprised of many different integrated elements, that when working together, can create a meaningful and fun experience for customers. In order to provide this experience, companies marketing themselves across the Facebook environment need a tool that incorporates all the facets of social commerce into one easy to use platform.
Currently, there are only a few solid page development and commerce solutions for Facebook available in the market today. On the page development side, these include companies such as… North Social, Buddy Media, Wildfire, Lujure, FanPageEngine, Pagemodo, and TabSite. On the commerce solutions side, these include companies such as, TabJuice, Volusion, Voiyk, Storefront Social, BigCommerce, Payvment and ShopTab. All of which only offer only a part of the solution to today’s problem of creating “both” Facebook Pages and Selling Products on Facebook (which is needed for true Social Commerce). A true Social Commerce solution must have the renforcement of promotional marketing, analytical and customer management tools… all wrapped around an online storefront. Oh and btw… all of this needs to be fully integrated and affordable to not just the Fortune 5000, but the SOHO’s and SMB’s too!
The currently available solutions today provide only generic html/iframe templates or a single application solution “only”, with little or no integration. Or they attempt to up-sell the customer to a costly, custom development package costing anywhere from thousands to tens-of-thousands of dollars or more, with little or no management tools or integration. Fanpage Toolkit’s Social Commerce and Marketing Platform is a product array of application solutions, offering much more than just templates and a single application solution. Fanpage Toolkit offers, a Complete Solution to Social Commerce for Everyone!
Currently, competing products offer the ability to integrate data feeds and CSV store file imports into a Facebook store environment, completely neglecting the ability to share data between the popular Magento, eBay, Shopify and ZenCart store interfaces. In fact, outside of Fanpage Toolkit… only Payvment and Tabjuice offer the ability to complete transactions within Facebook’s ecosystem. Social commerce integration aside, what about other apps that complete the social commerce experience for a customer?
What tool integrates apps for custom page building, sweepstakes and promotions, messaging, or analytics? None! No single service on the market integrates all the apps for a complete social commerce experience into one tool, except Fanpage Toolkit.
| Social Commerce Tool |
Fanpage Toolkit |
Payvment |
Tabjuice |
Voiyk |
| In-Facebook Transactions |
YES |
YES |
YES |
NO |
| Facebook Page Builder |
YES |
NO |
NO |
NO |
| Promotional Apps |
YES (Full Marketing Suite) |
LIMITED |
LIMITED |
NO |
| Integrated Messaging |
YES |
NO |
NO |
NO |
| Analytics |
YES |
LIMITED |
NO |
NO |
Table 2: Brief Feature Comparison
In order to achieve the best results, social commerce campaigns must not only reach their audience in a variety of ways, but campaigns must be easy for companies and individual users to manage. With Fanpage Toolkit, creating, updating, and analyzing a social commerce campaign has never been more powerful or intuitive.
The Solution to the Chaos: Fanpage Toolkit
With an abundance of third party apps and programs, users have been able to piece together social commerce campaigns with varying degrees of success. In order to make sense of the chaos, a unified solution is necessary, and, if value comes from integration of services, Fanpage Toolkit is packed to the brim with potential.
Most attractively, Fanpage Toolkit provides all of the tools and back-office resources necessary to guide the subscriber step by-step with little effort and full system automation through the implementation of a highly personalized presence in the Facebook ecosystem. Included in the package are pre-built and semi-custom industry specific template-based page environments, which are built and maintained to Facebook’s specification for pages. All Fanpage Toolkit subscribers will have the ability to market their products/services, create/manage promotions, manage customer customers/leads, create/manage in-Facebook stores and have a visualization dashboard with full analytics. Facebook Page Builder, Promotions and the F-Commerce application sets are wizard driven systems that within a few clicks of the user will implement a highly customized presence on Facebook. Using onscreen real-time editors, publishing to Facebook is automated and is as simple as clicking your mouse.
Fanpage Toolkit also offers its subscribers an F-Commerce add-on, which allows the user to create a full-featured shopping cart system within Facebook, including PayPal and Authorize.Net merchant processing support.
What pushes Fanpage Toolkit even further ahead of the competition, though, is its extensive support for 3rd-party e-commerce platforms. Only in Fanpage Toolkit can page owners fully integrate a Magento and eBay storefront, featuring one-click sync capability for all store catalog inventories and shipping.
As more social commerce products emerge on the market, it will be important for users to have one trusted name to turn to for an integrated solution. Instead of having to piece together various third party solutions, companies should only have to turn to one resource.
With Fanpage Toolkit, true social commerce will become a reality for businesses, brands, non-profits, artists, individuals and more across the social landscape.