'Net Features : Payvment

Payvment to Refer Current Customers to Ecwid

Michael Garrity — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 18:35:00 GMT

A new Facebook commerce deal will see the social commerce platform Payvment, which powers most of the storefronts on the social network, referring its many subscribers to the e-commerce widget provider Ecwid in anticipation of the platform's demise at the end of February.

Needless to say, this will be a big boost that pretty much positions Ecwid as the leading social commerce platform on the market; in fact, the company already powers the most Facebook storefronts by active users. Currently, more than 250,000 merchants in over 174 countries are using Ecwid, and the platform is integrated with “all major payment gateways,” which include PayPal, Google Wallet, FirstData and Authorize.net.

Payvment recently announced that it would be closing its service on February 28, but wanted to provide its customers with a smooth transition to a new platform. The deal with Ecwid will allow Payvment customers to continue selling on Facebook and other online properties with little-to-no hassle.

“Ecwid’s e-commerce technology will not only enable our merchants to keep selling on Facebook,” says Payvment CEO Jim Stoneham, “But also allow them the opportunity to open up new channels by placing a store anywhere their customers shop online.”

The cloud-based e-commerce widget from Ecwid can easily be embedded into any Web pages or blogs, but for most Payvment users, it’s the platform’s Facebook capabilities that they’ll really be interested in. Ecwid’s Facebook application lets merchants add fully featured e-commerce stores to their Facebook pages in “a few clicks,” enabling the social network’s users to discover products and make purchases without ever having to leave Facebook (which may just be a dream come true for some consumers).

Ecwid has shown consistent growth in the f-commerce field, with total sales from Ecwid-powered stores growing 65 percent from October through December 2012 over the preceding fiscal quarter. The platform also powered up to 8.5 percent of all Facebook purchases this past holiday season.

Weekly Deals from Payvment Simplify Social Promotions

Michael Garrity — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 19:00:00 GMT

Facebook’s most popular e-commerce platform, Payvment, announced a new “Weekly Deals” feature that gives sellers the ability to offer up to three deals a week on Facebook and Lish.com, the new social shopping site from Payvment, just in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Payvment recently surveyed many of its sellers and found that most of them had a strong interest in deal-like promotional strategies, and 48 percent of the respondents said that they planned to run a promotion during the holidays. Some of the early testing of the Weekly Deals functionality showed that “time-bounded offers” drive more conversions; in fact, Payvment found that participating merchants using Weekly Deals last holiday season saw twice as many product views and sales than in weeks prior.

Thanks to Payvment and Weekly Deals, smaller online merchants now have more tools to help them participate and compete in the holiday promotion season, as sellers can now use Facebook to promote their products for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and beyond. Plus, shoppers will be able to use the social network or scour Lish to find deals of 20 percent or higher.

Payvment seems so enamored with Weekly Deals that the company has actually reoriented its seller dashboard around the new functionality in order to simplify the deals management process. Merchants can use the dashboard to launch as many as three deals each week by selecting the products they want to promote, choosing the discount amount(s) and designating the quantity of products that are eligible for the deal. They can then take advantage of Payvment’s analytics tools to monitor each deal’s effectiveness.

All of the deals are automatically and seamlessly posted into the Weekly Deal feed on Lish at Lish.com/deals. The promotions also appear on the merchant’s Facebook news feed.

Sellers looking to offer Black Friday promotions (which run from November 23 – November 27) can go to my.pavyment.com to set up a store and feature their products.

Say Hello to Facebook Monday

Allison Howen — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 15:23:00 GMT

Some merchants are forgetting about Cyber Monday, and instead, are focusing their energy on “Facebook Monday.”

This is because a new survey from social commerce solutions provider Payvment reveals that Facebook merchants are optimistic that their storefronts will produce better sales this holiday season. In fact, the F-Commerce Facts survey reveals that 49 percent of Facebook sellers anticipate an increase in sales over last year, while only 13 percent expect a decline in sales.

Additionally, the survey found that 48 percent of Facebook merchants plan to run holiday promotions in order to boost sales. While 34 percent of merchants plan to offer free shipping, 23 percent plan to offer a 10 percent price discount and 18 percent plan to offer a discount of up to 20 percent. Furthermore, the study found that many merchants plan to leverage Facebook ads to capture their consumers’ attention. For example, 42 percent of the survey’s respondents report having used Facebook Ads in the past, and more than 65 percent of those respondents claim that they will use Facebook ads again – due to their effectiveness and customer acquisition results.

Other statistics worth noting show that F-commerce sellers are increasingly promoting their storefronts through other social channels, including Twitter and Pinterest. In fact, 35 percent of merchants use Twitter to drive traffic to their Facebook storefronts, while 20 percent of merchants use Pinterest to drive traffic. Other channels that F-commerce merchants use to promote their storefronts include their company website (32 percent), email (30 percent), print ads (8 percent), direct mail (9 percent) and search ads (7 percent).

According to the study, almost half of the respondents choose to sell on Facebook because it makes it easy to market to their consumers through deals and product promotions. However, 54 percent of the respondents like to sell on Facebook because their customers don't need to leave the social platform in order to make a purchase.

“With hundreds of thousands of small businesses now selling products on Facebook and many planning significant promotions and discounts for the holidays, Cyber Monday could very well become ‘Facebook Monday’ this year,” said Jim Stoneham, CEO of Payvment. “The data also shows that Facebook sellers are continuing to invest in promoting their storefronts via Facebook Ads, as well as offering deals and promotions and aggressively marketing their stores via other social channels such as Twitter and Pinterest.”

Discover the Social Web's Hottest Products

Allison Howen — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 15:00:00 GMT

New social commerce site Lish.com is enabling consumers to discover and purchase the hottest products on the social Web.

The product discovery site is currently in beta, and was recently launched by popular F-commerce platform Payvment. Lish features a real-time feed of items that are trending on Facebook and Twitter in order to help boost discovery for Payvment’s 175,000 sellers and their products.

Consumers also have the ability provide feedback for each product, which influences the items that are featured on Lish.com amongst the 4 million products that are available on Payvment’s seller network. Additionally, the social commerce site offers one-click purchasing in order to make the transaction process quick for consumers on both mobile devices and the traditional Web.

“Lish.com recreates the serendipitous discovery and impulse buying experience that makes shopping in the real world so much fun,” says Jim Stoneham, CEO of Payvment. “Our vision is to create a place where sellers and shoppers connect in a meaningful way beyond just a transaction.”

Payvment Introduces One-click Facebook Ad Service

Linc Wonham — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 15:30:00 GMT

Social commerce platform Payvment has launched a one-click Facebook advertising service that enables sellers to quickly turn their promotional posts into Facebook Ads.

The new service automatically targets the ads using a proprietary algorithm that predicts which audience segments are most likely to be interested in a seller’s products based on previous social shopping data. Initial tests of the service have shown up to a 25-percent increase in click-through rates over standard self-serve Facebook Ads.

A recent survey of Payvment’s customer base of over 165,000 small and mid-sized businesses revealed that more than 60 percent have yet to try Facebook Ads, with 25 percent saying they haven’t tried them because they don’t understand how to use them.

Of those who had bought Facebook Ads, two-thirds who said they weren’t satisfied cited low click-through rates or poor targeting as reasons not to use the service again.

Payvment’s new one-click Facebook Ad buying service is integrated into the company’s standard promotions tool. When sellers create a promotional post, they can opt to reach beyond their fan base via a Facebook Ad. The seller edits the headline and body of the post, selects their budget (which generates an estimated reach for the ad), then clicks “promote” to launch the ad. Once the ad is live, sellers can track performance in their Payvment dashboard.

Payvment instantaneously analyzes a seller’s inventory and shopper engagement patterns and correlates this with aggregate profile data from the more than 40 million Facebook users who have interacted with Payvment storefronts, and uses this analysis to predict which types of users are likely to be interested in the seller’s products.

“Targeting Facebook Ads can be a bit of a guessing game – it’s hard for sellers to know exactly which audiences will respond to their products,” says Christian Taylor, founder and CEO of Payvment. “Since Payvment powers a majority of the shopping on Facebook, we see patterns that we use to create very effective targeting. No one else can do this. The small and medium-sized businesses that use Payvment have historically looked at Facebook Ads as out of reach for their business – either they’re not clear on how they work, or they don’t want to spend money learning as they go. They can now use Payvment’s new ad offering to get started with very little effort or cost – in one click they’ve placed the ad, and Payvment does the rest for them.”

F-Commerce Growing at Impressive Rate

Michael Garrity — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 19:45:00 GMT

Many Web professionals are wondering if Facebook commerce is a legitimate and sustainable industry.

According to Payvment (which is, coincidentally, a Facebook commerce platform provider), f-commerce is showing some impressive growth as of late. This data was released in the company's F-Commerce Facts survey that looked at over 100,000 sellers on Facebook, many of which are small businesses with under 500 fans.

The survey says that most of these companies are rapidly adopting and favoring Facebook Ads, and they usually like the service so much that they plan on using it again.

In addition, smaller sellers tend to use a wide variety of outside marketing channels such as Twitter, Google ads and email to drive traffic to their Facebook storefronts. Thirty-eight percent of respondents advertise their Facebook stores on their primary websites, while 34 percent use Twitter, and 30 percent use email marketing campaigns.

Beyond general Facebook marketing, Facebook Ads are by far the top promotional tool for these brands, as 39 percent of the respondents are using or have used the service before. Facebook Ads also show high favorability marks amongst those sellers who have used them.

The survey also showed that most respondents (61 percent) said that the ability to promote their products using social media was the biggest benefit of f-commerce, while 60 percent said they like that customers don't have to leave Facebook to complete a transaction. Brands utilizing f-commerce solutions appear to be convinced of their benefits, and over one-third of the respondents use Facebook as their sole sales channel.

On the more negative side of things, the biggest problem the respondents came up with was their small fanbase.

Payvment Launches Social IQ for Facebook Sellers

Linc Wonham — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 15:30:00 GMT

Facebook e-commerce platform Payvment has introduced a new tool that guides sellers towards the optimal social media activities to boost sales and engagement in their Facebook stores.

Based on analysis of over two years of data from thousands of successful sellers, Payvment Social IQ technology delivers a daily set of customized actions to help sellers who are new to social commerce drive fan-base growth, traffic and sales. The technology is embedded in a new release of Payvment’s Social Commerce Dashboard, which has an added set of tools to monitor key social commerce metrics and track the impact of new campaigns.

Payvment’s Social IQ is also designed to make it easy for sellers to try new social marketing tactics such as running a Twitter promotion or offering a “Like” discount for fans, while being able to measure exactly how those actions improve product discovery and sales.

Key features of Social IQ include the following:

•    Things You Did: Tallies the deals, promotions and polls a seller has run in the past week
•    Shopper Reactions: Shows how shoppers engaged based on the social actions
•    Your Bottom Line: Tallies Fans, product views and revenue earned based on social activity, while showing whether those totals are trending up or down over time
•    Social IQ Booster: Suggests simple ways to grow your Social IQ score and increase engagement and sales
•    Social IQ Leaderboard: Shows the other sellers who are most active and socially engaged with shoppers and how they compare

Visit Payvment’s Seller Spotlight section for profiles of merchants who have achieved success with Facebook commerce.

Payvment Adds Polling Feature to Social Shopping Platform

Allison Howen — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 07:38:00 GMT

Facebook e-commerce platform Payvment has added a new Polls feature to its solution.

The addition lets sellers create polls featuring their own products, and then invite shoppers to vote. What is interesting about this development in particular is that it uses Facebook’s new Open Graph technology. When a brand’s fans vote on a poll, their actions appear within their Facebook ticker, news feed and timeline which promotes the poll and the e-commerce merchant.

“Payvment continues to add new functionality to our suite of social promotion tools to help sellers boost shopper engagement, drive traffic to their storefronts and increase sales,” said Christian Taylor, CEO and co-founder of Payvment. “With our new Polls and Free Shipping features, our sellers now have two more powerful ways to build their business using Payvment.”

Payvment Launches Developer Platform

Allison Howen — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 16:00:00 GMT

Payvment, a Facebook e-commerce platform, is launching a developer platform for social commerce called Open Payvment.

Open Payvment allows application developers and service providers to join their offerings with Payvment. Companies can integrate Payvment into their products and services, build new apps and gain exposure to more than 100,000 Facebook sellers that are already using the Payvment social commerce platform.

"Payvment is the first foray into e-commerce for many new sellers — as their businesses grow, they are frequently looking for additional solutions that are compatible with their Payvment store, such as web-based e-commerce or mobile commerce solutions," says Christian Taylor, founder and CEO of Payvment. "Companies that integrate with Payvment gain early access to thousands of new potential customers."

The Open Payvment platform was designed for two different types of developers — companies that want to add on or create new services using Payvment, as well as companies that want to integrate their products and services with Payvment.

Currently Open Payment offers three different APIs, including:

Order Management — This API allows third-party software to obtain Facebook order data, and gives sellers the ability to manage the lifecycle of an order. Social management platforms or service providers can also use the Order API to obtain unique social commerce analytics by combining the order data with the social engagement data.

Product Import — This API is designed for multi-channel e-commerce platforms. It allows for the complete management of Facebook store product inventory from any third-party e-commerce platform.

Real-time Orders Notification — This API allows developers to set real-time messaging around new orders. This includes push notifications to mobile devices and a system notification to launch a shipment or other processes.

Master List of Facebook Commerce Platforms

Administrator — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 20:30:00 GMT

Utilizing Facebook’s massive audience to help grow an e-commerce business through social networking takes little more than common sense and hard work. However, to take full advantage of the world's largest social network as an actual selling platform requires a little more know-how than elbow grease.

Facebook as an e-commerce platform makes sense for just about any retailer on the Web, especially given the fact that the ChannelAdvisor Facebook Commerce Index has seen a 6.5 percent retail fan increase since June. Now commonly referred to as F-Commerce, the platforms below enable Facebook shoppers -- all 750 million of them -- to buy directly from merchants without leaving their favorite site.

ShopIgniter
ShopIgniter provides a social commerce suite of products for those interested in using Facebook as an e-commerce solution. The suite includes the sCommerce Platform, Social Promotion Engine and Facebook Store. With this suite, businesses have the ability to manage products, pricing, marketing and more.

An additional feature of the ShopIgniter Facebook application is the ability for consumers to purchase items without leaving Facebook, which is great considering that 700 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each month. Visit ShopIgniter’s website to request a demo of the sCommerce suite.

ShopVisible
This solution isn’t a widget or application, instead it is a platform created for Facebook that can be used alone or with an existing e-commerce store. A few features that are included with ShopVisible are payment processing, shipping, content management, order management and customer relationship management functions.

This platform also gives consumers the ability to compare and share products with friends, which gives businesses even more publicity and can lead to more fan “likes.”

BigCommerce
The BigCommerce application puts a shop tab on a business’s fan page. This tab takes consumers to a BigCommerce SocialShop, where they have the ability to purchase items and share products through their news stream.

This solution also allows a business to share their featured products through their business page. BigCommerce offers a free 15 day trial for their services, and after that prices start at $24.95 a month.

VendorShop
This free solution features a dashboard, which makes managing multiple stores and tracking changes easier. Consumers can make their purchases without leaving Facebook, and merchants are allowed to post an unlimited amount of products to their storefront.

Additionally, in order to drive a business’s “likes,” fans of a business are eligible for discounts, but consumers do not have to be fans in order to make a purchase.

Payvment
This free ecommerce platform claims that its users see their first sale in less than three days after their store’s launch on Facebook.

With this social media e-commerce solution, consumers can conveniently browse and purchase items without ever leaving Facebook. Another available feature of Payvment is the Shopping Mall, which allows consumers to browse over 2 million products as well as view items that their friends have “liked.”

Payvment Promises Quick Results For Facebook Retailers

Allison Howen — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 23:00:00 GMT

Payvment, a free ecommerce platform for Facebook, claims that its users see their first sale in less than three days after launching their store on Facebook through the Payvment platform.

The fast turnaround is due to social promotion as well as features that enable sellers to attract new shoppers to their storefronts, even shoppers that are outside of their fan database.

Another reason for Payvment's success is its ability to keep users on Facebook. Customers can purchase their items within the merchant’s page and without being redirected to the merchant’s website.

Payvment claims to be Facebook’s largest ecommerce platform with over 60,000 storefronts and 400 new stores opening each day. The platform also features a Shopping Mall, where you can search over 2 million products and view items that your friends like.

Visit Payvment to learn more about setting up your free Facebook store.

Shopping and Facebook - Hit the Payvment

Pete Prestipino — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 19:00:00 GMT

Payvment, an ecommerce platform for Facebook, today launched a shopping mall on the social network with over one million searchable products.

Features of the shopping mall include:

- a directory to make locating stores or brands easy
- the ability for user to “like” what they want
- personalized recommendations using the social graph
- a dashboard for likes and what friends like too

“The Shopping Mall on Facebook is where online shopping gets truly social,” said Christian Taylor, founder and chief executive officer of Payvment. “We are confident that the Shopping Mall on Facebook will be the place people go to discover new brands, great deals, and the products they and their friends want.”

Payvment Adds Coupons to Facebook E-commerce App

Linc Wonham — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 20:30:00 GMT

Payvment, an e-commerce Facebook app that allows users to sell products on the social site, is launching a new feature that will provide pricing incentives for users to become fans of a seller’s pages. Retailers selling merchandise through Payvment can now use the new Facebook Fan Incentive Pricing feature to offer immediate coupons to fans of their pages, and discounted pricing to visitors who become fans.

Using the Payvment e-commerce app, Facebook users can set up a retail environment with product photos, terms of service, shipping options and other e-commerce tools that will appear in the Storefront tab on their personal profiles. Now, with the new coupons function, Facebook retailers can reward their existing fans and offer incentives to potential fans. The new feature also allows users to “carry” their products across other Facebook storefronts and to write comments and reviews of their shopping experience.

The free app from Payvment gives e-commerce professionals an ideal platform not only to create brand awareness and build a following, but also to sell product. Payvment uses PayPal’s Adaptive Payments API and is similar to other Facebook shopping apps such as the recently launched SocialShop from BigCommerce and Alvenda’s 1-800-Flowers.