'Net Features : f-commerce

Chirpify Brings In-Stream Commerce to Facebook

Michael Garrity — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 21:00:00 GMT

For in-stream commerce platform provider Chirpify, it’s time to leave the nest and venture out into the great, big world of social media. That’s right, it’s finally bringing its service to Facebook, so now users can buy products on the world’s largest social network with just one comment.

Until now, Chirpify was only available on Twitter and Instagram, but by inserting its social commerce product into the Facebook news feed, it has brought its capabilities to an average of more than 618 million daily active users. Now, businesses, non-profits and consumers can buy, sell, donate or raise funds from within their news feeds without ever having to leave Facebook.

This could be beneficial, of course, to some of the nearly 80 percent of American businesses that have a presence on the social network, especially if they have an active and engaged collection of “fans” on the website.

To use Chirpify on Facebook, a customer simply has to create a listing in the Chirpify dashboard and include various important details, such as item, dollar amount, shipping time and price, as well as indicating whether the product is digital or physical. Once that’s done, they simply need to click on the “Facebook” button to turn the listing live. From there, the post will show up (and work) in both consumer and brand page news feeds.

Consumers will then buy, donate or enter a giveaway on a posted listing by commenting with either “buy,” “donate” or “gimme,” respectively. From there, Chirpify takes over and makes a payment happen automatically, before sending the consumer a secure download or receipt via email. Chirpify customers can manage all transactions and data from their Chirpify dashboards.

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.

Customers Buy Into F-Commerce

Allison Howen — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 15:15:00 GMT

More consumers are buying into social commerce, according to recent data from shopping cart application provider Ecwid.

The data was aggregated from merchants who are leveraging Ecwid’s Facebook application, and it reveals that in Q3 of 2012, total sales from all Ecwid-powered Facebook stores grew 36 percent from the previous quarter, while Facebook store orders grew by 39 percent in the same time frame. Furthermore, the data shows that the majority of these social stores are owned by small- to medium-sized businesses.

“F-Commerce could stand for ’flourishing’ commerce in the SMB market we serve,” said Jim O’Hara, president of Ecwid, Inc. “While some big name retailers have misfired at Facebook commerce, we see a different story with small businesses, which seem to be more effective at connecting personally with social audiences.”

It is important to note that despite the varied success that merchants have with F-commerce, Ecwid data from the last two years found that merchants who sell on both the traditional Web and Facebook storefronts, generate between 9 percent and 22 percent of their online income from Facebook.

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.”

A First-rate Facebook Commerce Outlook for SMBs

Linc Wonham — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 22:00:00 GMT

Responding to recent questions surrounding the sustainability of Facebook commerce, the makers of the social network’s second largest store-building application have spoken out.

On average, according to research recently released by Ecwid, businesses that have both website and Facebook stores get 15 percent of their overall revenue from the Facebook stores. The statistics were pulled from aggregate data based on the more than 140,000 Ecwid-powered storefronts in 174 countries, a large portion of which are also on Facebook, and most of which are small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

The data also showed that the average revenue of each Facebook store powered by Ecwid’s software rose 40 percent in 2011.

“F-Commerce is not only alive and well, it is growing,” says Ruslan Fazlyev, CEO and founder of Ecwid, a free, SaaS-based store-building widget. “While some big brands have stumbled, our data shows the SMB market is making progress on Facebook and other social sites. This may be where the real social commerce innovation is to be found.”

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.

Solving the Facebook Merchant Exodus

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 22:00:00 GMT

There seems to be a merchant exodus occurring on Facebook recently. Bloomberg’s Ashely Lutz wrote recently on the troubles of Gamestop, which opened a store in April 2010 only to shutter their f-commerce initiatives six months later.

Gamestop isn’t alone, however – Gap, JC Penny, and Nordstrom have also jumped ship. So what’s going on here? Has the community of Internet retailers invested too hastily into f-commerce? Can it ever work?

The rise in number of social commerce platforms on the market today may be causing the problem – at least in part. A multitude of vendors fill the f-commerce landscape including Payvment, ShopIgniter and startups like Moluku, and they are all clamoring for some attention from retailers. But these offerings may just be solutions without an actual problem.

The real problem, at least as I see it, is that consumers aren’t really in “buying mode” when they’re on Facebook. Not that it doesn’t happen, but is it happening enough to warrant the investment? In my opinion, it is but not in the way that most merchants have their e-commerce/f-commerce platforms aligned.

There are a few strategies which may just right the ship, however. Instead of porting all of your existing products into Facebook and dropping them on a tab, another way might be to use the functionality offered by many of the f-commerce platforms to showcase products and drive interest, rather than drive sales.

For example, since we know that saturating social media feeds has the opposite effect and causes brand disengagement, a better idea might simply be to use Facebook to profile individual items and make the social participation around that product the sole focus of the day.

Just one way I think to showcase products on Facebook and drive sales. Do you have some ideas? Please share them in the comments section below!

RetailMeNot.com Likes Facebook

Michael Garrity — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 21:30:00 GMT

Social media commerce continues to grow, and many ecommerce companies are slowly starting to focus more of their efforts on moving into the market. Whether or not this is the future of online shopping is yet to be seen, but many online properties certainly seem to think that it might.

The latest convert is the online coupon site RetailMeNot, which recently launched its “Today’s Top Deals” Facebook application “to help consumers shop smart and save money during the 2011 holiday shopping season.” The app includes coupons, promotional codes and special deals from some of the company’s merchants, allowing customers to save an average of almost $20 on products and services. Some of the more notable merchants with “Today’s Top Deals” listings are Overstock.com, The Gap, Cooking.com, Dell and PetCo.

“Social media continues to play a more heightened role in how we communicate to consumers. The ‘Today’s Top Deals’ app will help us get the best deals to our fans on Facebook,” says RetailMeNot’s Senior Vice President, Jag Bath.

Intuit’s F-Commerce Offering SimpleStore Arrives

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 20:15:00 GMT

Intuit, best known for its business and financial management software solutions for SMB’s, announced the release of SimpleStore for Facebook, an f-commerce solution which enables merchants to sync their website and Facebook page.

Perhaps the single biggest benefit of SimpleStore for Facebook is the one-page checkout which is made possible by Intuit’s Web Payment services. Small business owners can accept credit or debit card payments directly on Facebook with no added log-ins required for the customer. Since Intuit Web Payment is already tied to a users’ merchant account, small businesses receive payment directly (and quickly) from Intuit, whether a sale is made on their website or Facebook page.

There is currently a 30-day free trial of the service, costing roughly $35/mo thereafter.

“In today’s online world, it is more important than ever for small businesses to be where their customers are and this holiday season they have the ability to sell to Facebook’s 800 million users,” said Barry Saik, vice president and general manager of Intuit's Grow Your Business division. “This tool will allow small businesses to be everywhere at once, capturing online shopping traffic through both their website and Facebook page.”

There’s a lot of interest in Facebook commerce (f-commerce) today but the verdict is still out for merchants in relation to how well it is performing. Got an opinion on f-commerce? Share with the Website Magazine community by commenting below.

Related F-Commerce Content on at WebsiteMagazine:
- Facebook Commerce for the Socially Challenged
- Master List of Facebook Commerce platforms
- In-Stream Checkout with ShopIgniter
- The Socialization of Online Commerce
- Wishpond F-Commerce for the Brick & Mortar Set

Wishpond F-Commerce for the Brick & Mortar Set

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 02:00:00 GMT

If you are a local store looking to capitalize on the social media trend, and more specifically through Facebook, you might want to take a look at RetailConnect - launched last month by local shopping platform Wishpond.

The solution enables merchants to import their product data from point of sale systems (including prices, locations and product images), e-commerce sites or storefronts on eBay, Shopify and Google Merchant center and turn them into full fledged Facebook stores. Screenshots were a little hard to come by but we'll update this post as they become available.

Perhaps most interesting about RetailConnect is that it automatically refreshes merchant stores, monitoring inventory data in real time from the actual store and updating it on the Facebook page of the merchant - making it one of the few vendors to connect in such a way. The solution can even help merchants post promotions and other notifications on the walls of their fans. And all while gaining a few insights along the way. Analytics to dig into include data on location, age, gender, and even the number of users who action on a promotion.

According to a post on the Wishpond blog from July 2011, Wishpond RetailConnect is free to retailers with fewer than five bricks-and-mortar stores that have 100 or fewer items in their inventory. Paid plans start at $30 per month and go up to $300 per month for larger retailers with 25,000 or more products.

SortPrice is F-Commerce Unstoppable

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 23:00:00 GMT

SortPrice has released some impressive statistics on the growth in retailers using its store application on Facebook.

"Last year, retailers across the board began to realize the importance of hopping on the social shopping bandwagon," said Asaf Klibansky, SortPrice's co-founder and CTO. "And as they have since 2008 when we introduced the Store Application, more merchants turned to SortPrice.com than anyone else to help them tap into the enormous audiences available to them on Facebook."

Nothing is more important than the actual performance metrics and those from Sortprice are quite interesting:

- More than $3.78 billion worth of merchandise was on SortPrice-built Facebook storefronts throughout 2010.

- More than 7.6 million were products on SortPrice merchants Facebook storefronts in 2010, 60 percent more total products than in 2009.

The top industry categories for merchants using the shopping application are apparel, womens jewely, home and garden, gifts and flowers, and computers.