Until last year everything was rosy in the ecommerce world, now it’s all changed. Some really smart people decided that if they put a letter at the start of commerce, they would have a new route to market that could be exploited. To better explain, in the last year we have seen the rise of
M-commerce
S-Commerce
F-Commerce
And without forgetting my old favourite E-commerce.
The first is targeted at mobile users so it’s not something I will speak about much here. The other 2 however are interesting subjects and both rely solely on social media to help sell.
S-commerce or social commerce has been around for a while now, but F-commerce or Facebook commerce is a new beast altogether and the first real taste we got, was with Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote speech towards the end of last year.
Until Zuckerberg stated Facebook’s intentions on these fronts I hadn’t really taken much notice. I like ecommerce and I wanted it to stay that way, but if the guy that built Facebook says something is going to take off, we have to listen.
First off you’ll be glad to know that social commerce has been around for years now. Facebook are planning to give it a face lift (I’ll explain what they have planned later). But the basic idea of social commerce is reviews and we’ve all been using them for years. If you go onto a forum and ask what is the best type of fishing rod to buy. The answers that people give are a basically social commerce. You are taking other peoples advice and suggestions before you make a purchase.
Now this is where Facebook have decided that they want to freshen things up a little.
They want to create a semantic web and they plan to do it using their Facebook “like” as a key element.
The idea behind a semantic web is that instead of using Google to find what you want, Facebook will take what your group of friends have liked and make suggestions to you based on that. They basically want to create a social web and by using its 500 million members and their set of widgets and plugins they want to interconnect the web with Facebook at the core and every time a Facebook member clicks the “like” button they are helping them do that.
Now back to social commerce.
If you read a ton of reviews about a product that all say it’s great, there is a good chance that you will buy that product. If you are looking at that products page and handful of your friends have “liked” that product, there is an ever greater chance you will buy it and for a number of reason. Firstly you are more likely to take your friends advice over that of a stranger. The concept also plays on the human emotion of feeling excepted. If your group is telling you to buy something there is a greater chance you will because it will make you feel a part of that group.
Now onto F-commerce
This is basically selling directly on Facebook, I really like this idea and for a number of reasons. You can get your shop set up, really quickly and for free!, the normal hassle associated with launching an ecommerce store is removed, SSL, domains, hosting, it’s all taken care of . But the biggest advantage is you quite litterly have a captive audience and a big one at that, around 500 million. It’s well known that the traffic coming from social media usually converts pretty poorly but if you are playing the numbers game, half a billion is a pretty good number to start!.
So as you can see, Facebook have some ambitious plans laid down, whether or not they can achieve them is another matter, I think F-commerce will work well, but creating a semantic web is another question, Google won’t lie down either and there is a good chance they will just start to copy what Facebook are doing. Remember the search engines have been doing it to each other for years but instead of the others copying Google, it’s now Google Copying Facebook.
This is a guest post from Neil at eMobileScan, A company with sites throughout Europe focusing on offering the latest in label printers like the zebra ZM400 or the TLP2844.