Facebook commerce is growing although many people (myself included) don't feel it. According to sortprice.com, their clients alone (1500) listed 3.8 billion of merchandise last year using their Facebook commerce solutions.
Facebook offers an ecosystem that is extremely attractive for merchants. 800 million users, a social graph, a deep knowledge of interests, etc. The question now is how to leverage all that. Facebook is moving slowly but probably surely.
Facebook probably needs to increase the visibility of its shopping apps including its marketplace and do more effort to push people to use them. After all, while it makes more sense for me to look for an apartment rental on Facebook since I use it everyday anyway and since there are social links that improve my trust I still use Craigslist.
Shopping and transactions generally could be a huge source of revenue for facebook but it needs a lot of work which should be done fast.
1 comment:
I did alot of research recently on social commerce and I think you are spot on - Facebook needs to leverage its advantages in the mass social network market and integrate better with e-commerce. I don't know how big the take up is of f-commerce but there are many startups dedicated to 'crowdsourced' buying which are doing very nicely. This implies two things 1) If Facebook can better innovate integration of its social platform to f-commerce it stands to do pretty well 2) Its here to stay - shopping through peers and friends recommendations will become mainstream and there is a first mover advantage here. Using the example you gave of real estate, there is a company called flat-club based out of London which is trying to do just that. The concept is short term letting of your house/flat to friends and trusted networks to try to eliminate the inevitable risks in this market. The real estate market as a whole though, especially in New York have been slow to adopt such technologies. So whoever is the first to adopt a serious social commerce strategy stands to gain a significant chunk of the market.
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