'Net Features : social commerce

Social Commerce Continues to Grow on Ecwid

Allison Howen — Fri, 03 May 2013 13:22:00 GMT

The popularity of social commerce hasn’t slowed down, instead, first quarter data from Facebook shopping cart application Ecwid shows that this trend has seen significant year-over-year growth.

The data reveals that merchants leveraging the Ecwid platform have seen orders grow by 37 percent in their Facebook-based stores compared to the same period last year, as well as a 26 percent increase in sales.

The merchants included within this research maintain stores both on a website and on Facebook. According to the data, these merchants’ Facebook-based sales saw a 25 percent year-over-year increase, making up 10.3 percent of the merchants’ total online sales.

“We’re seeing an increasing number of our merchants open online stores on multiple sites – like their website, blog, mobile site and a Facebook page,” said Jim O’Hara, president of Ecwid, Inc. “We believe retailers should be able to sell anywhere their customers wish to shop online, not just on a traditional website store, eBay or Amazon. Retailers should have multiple online storefronts to reflect where their target customers look for products. In fact, some of our most successful merchants derive 50 to 80 percent of total online sales on Facebook, as they learn how to work the developing social commerce marketplace.”

This research suggests that consumer-shopping behavior is becoming increasingly more social. In fact, many shoppers are using social networks like Facebook and Pinterest as a way to discover products instead of traditional search, which has resulted in more merchants deploying multiple storefronts to reach this customer segment.

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.

Twitter Allows AmEx Customers to Buy Products by Tweeting

Michael Garrity — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 18:35:00 GMT

Will that be cash, check or…tweet?

Yesterday, Twitter announced the kind of shocking news that users will now be able to pay for products by simply tweeting thanks to a new integrated payment system from American Express.

This feature is known as Amex Sync, and as the name suggests, it allows Twitter users to sync their American Express cards with their accounts on the social network (which means, of course, that this ability is currently limited to American Express customers only). Once the two accounts have been merged, users can buy selected items by including special hashtags in their tweets.

Once users have tweeted this hashtag, they’ll receive a response from the @AmexSync Twitter account; after that, all they have to do is tweet the confirmation hashtag within 15 minutes and the transaction is completed. All products will be delivered to the billing address that the user has on file.

Amex Sync was actually originally launched last year, but at the time it just let customers receive special offers, discounts or deals by tweeting specific hashtags; this new ability to purchase items was apparently the next logical step in the partnership between the two brands. It is particularly advantageous for Twitter, as the partnership provides a new source of revenue for a website that has long been reliant almost solely on advertising dollars.

At present, American Express has said that users can purchase “American Express Gift Cards and products from Amazon, Sony, Urban Zen and Xbox 360” using the Amex Sync payment system.

I guess all that’s left to do now is sit back and see if social commerce on Twitter takes off and finds greater success than it has so far on Facebook, where the results have (for the most part) been disappointing, at best.

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.

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.

In-Stream Transactions Come to Instagram

Michael Garrity — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 19:21:00 GMT

Social commerce payment system Chirpify is no longer just looking to monetize content on Twitter. In fact, it seems to be banking on the hope that a picture can be worth a thousand dollars, as the company recently expanded its platform to include in-stream commerce from Instagram.

At present, approximately 40 percent of the world’s largest brands have a presence on Instagram, but until now, they never had any way of turning that directly into dollars. Chirpify for Instagram is now the only way for businesses and consumers to either buy, sell, donate or otherwise exchange funds on the social network by turning comments on the site into real-time in-stream transactions.

Sellers (or fundraisers) can create a listing from within the Instagram application; all they have to do is post a photo and make sure that the initial comment reads, “#InstaSale $amount” (with “amount” actually being the price of the item being sold). Once this is done, Chirpify automatically creates a listing, and buyers can make a transaction by simply commenting.

Once a buyer comments, Chirpify will post another comment with purchase instructions. The shopper’s Instagram account will be securely connected to his or her PayPal account, and then they just have to leave a comment that says either “buy” or “donate” (depending on what they’re doing). It’s as easy as that, and then Chirpify will email them a secure download or receipt.

There are already many notable names using Instagram commerce, including Bogs, Fearless Records, Invisible Children, Kat Von D and many others.

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.”

Three's a Charm for This Social Platform

Allison Howen — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 17:00:00 GMT

A new social commerce platform helps merchants leverage the power of social networks to obtain more conversions, higher average order values, increased engagement and better word-of-mouth advertising.

The ShopSocially platform embeds social experiences, such as rule-based targeting, incentive management and social analytics into the merchant’s buying workflow to help improve discovery, engagement, decisions and conversions. Additionally, the platform offers a Social App Library with extensions that include viral offer sharing for better email promoting, incentivized share-a-promotion and share-a-purchase technology, ask-a-friend functionality, a Facebook fan aquisition tool and a shopping community feature, which allows merchants to create a social online shopping community.

“There are three key elements to a successful social commerce strategy,” says Jai Rawat, CEO and co-founder of ShopSocially. “One, focus on generating authentic word-of-mouth, consumer-to-consumer (C2C) recommendations. Two, embed rich, targeted social experiences in the entire buying workflow to create a better user experience. Revenue uplift will follow automatically. And three, experiment a lot. While there are certain best practices, social experiences have to be fine tuned for every site.”

According to ShopSocially, merchants that have leveraged the platform have reported up to three times an increase in sales from email promotions, a 12-percent average increase in site conversions, a larger social media audience through converting 2 to 5 percent of site traffic into fans, as well as an increase average of 95 percent for onsite and fanpage engagement.

Facebook Friends Share; Pinterest People Purchase

Linc Wonham — Wed, 30 May 2012 20:45:00 GMT

Pinterest users are 79 percent more likely to purchase items they see pinned on the site compared to the purchasing behavior of Facebook users viewing items they’ve seen on the news feed or a friend’s wall, according to a new survey released from behavioral commerce company SteelHouse.

Thirty-three percent of Facebook users said they have purchased a product or service that they’ve seen in a Facebook ad, on the news feed or on a friend’s wall, compared to 59 percent of Pinterest users who have made a purchase based on an item they saw on the pinboarding site. However, Facebook remains consumers’ top choice for getting ideas on what products or services to purchase, according to the survey, and is also the preferred choice for social product sharing. More than one half of those surveyed said they regularly share their online purchases.

Fifty-five percent of shoppers prefer to share their purchases on Facebook, followed by Twitter (22 percent), Pinterest (14 percent), and Instagram (5 percent). LinkedIn bottomed the list with only 3 percent of respondents using it to socially share purchases.

When asked about mobile shopping, 43 percent of those surveyed said they have downloaded a retailer’s mobile app and primarily use the app to browse for items (32 percent), make purchases (22 percent), and earn discounts and deals (26 percent). When making purchases, though, close to one third of respondents said they prefer to make purchases from a retailer's online store versus that retailer's mobile app.

In addition to getting more social and mobile with shopping, 98 percent of shoppers say that online customer reviews have a major influence on their decision to purchase a product or service. Seventy-two percent of consumers said that they always read reviews before making a purchase, while 26 percent of consumers only sometimes read reviews before purchasing.

When reading product reviews, 83 percent of shoppers take both the star rating and written comments into consideration. Star ratings are particularly important, as half of all respondents said the lowest star rating they would accept when making a purchase is three stars on a five-star scale.

Beyond just checking out reviews, many respondents said they also write reviews. Sixty-eight percent of shoppers say they rate and review products on a regular basis. The top product categories they write reviews on are electronics (23 percent), DVDs/CDs/MP3s (14 percent), books and clothing (both 13 percent).

Six Steps for Social Commerce Success

Linc Wonham — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 18:00:00 GMT

Recently, a few big brands such as Gap, Gamestop, Nordstrom and JC Penney closed their Facebook stores. As a result, many prognosticators sounded the death knell for Facebook commerce.

The fact is, nothing could be further from the truth.

As the second largest store-building application on Facebook, Ecwid’s aggregate data demonstrates that f-commerce is alive and well. The data shows that the small businesses that have both a website store and a Facebook store typically get 15 percent of their overall revenue from Facebook.

That’s a significant chunk. The data also shows the average revenue of each Facebook store powered by Ecwid’s software rose 40 percent in 2011.

“It’s a matter of time – within the next five or so years – before more business will be done on Facebook than Amazon,” says Sumeet Jain, principal at CMEA Capital.

That’s a pretty bold prediction. While this may not happen as fast or at the dramatic scale that Jain predicts, the trend is clear – social commerce is on the move, and SMBs may be leading the charge.

So why are some big brands failing while SMBs are finding their way? It’s all about how you engage your customers. Do small businesses have an advantage here? Is it easier for smaller, more personalized businesses to succeed at social commerce?

How effective are you at engaging your customers and selling products via social media?

Here are some concepts and best practices for selling on social networks and tapping this potentially lucrative avenue for expanding your business:

Recognize that social commerce isn’t new
“Social” has always been part of “commerce,” even when Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist. We listen to our friends’ recommendations and tend to buy more if we know a merchant personally.

So social media sites like Facebook and Twitter didn’t invent social commerce, but amplified it greatly. They introduced a convenient, easy and fast way to communicate with friends and others, and deliver “social messages” much faster and to a larger audience.

Fully utilize today’s powerful e-commerce tools
Merchants can now easily create f-commerce storefronts in minutes and make their offerings more targeted: e.g. show a discount on a particular book to all customers who like the book’s topic. This makes store offers more friendly, so social customers are more open to them.

Today’s modern store software also offers features previously found only in major brand storefronts, including powerful application program interface (API) options. Take advantage of this new breed of software and you’ll also spend less time on administration.

Decide what your unique social media strategy is
Most brands understand that they need to communicate with their customers, but many are not clear on what the conversation should be. A Facebook page is always a two-way communication, so if you’re not ready to engage your audience with a particular theme or approach, you won’t be successful.

This may involve trial-and-error, but eventually you’ll find a sweet spot of engagement. Also, always talk honestly and without marketing slang.

Don’t disrupt the conversation flow
If you’re going to make the leap from e-commerce to f-commerce – actually selling products on a site like Facebook – remember not to disrupt the original purpose of social networks, which is to connect people. You’ll want to make the process as seamless as possible, integrating your store into the conversation, and allowing people to shop without having to leave Facebook.

Avoid product “hawking” and focus on community building
Don’t try to just sell items on your Facebook page. Transforming your Facebook page into a list of links to your products will turn away customers.

Social networks are communications platforms, so maintaining a flow of communication with – and between – your customers is key. Try to build a community around your items, engage your customers, encourage fan-to-fan communication and product discussions, then simply offer a convenient way to buy.

Harness the power of your biggest fans
The enthusiast core of your audience loves to be recognized, so consider leveraging engaging, community-building applications such as “Fan of the Week,” new Open Graph API and frictionless sharing. This will help you to harness the power of your most avid customers.

Ultimately they are your biggest supporters, so it pays to offer them something special. You’ll be well rewarded as they spread their enthusiasm to friends.

About the author: Ruslan Fazlyev is the founder and CEO of Ecwid, a leading social commerce solutions provider that currently powers more than 140,000 online stores.

PowerReviews Introduces its Essential Social Suite

Linc Wonham — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 22:00:00 GMT

Customer reviews technology provider PowerReviews has launched a new set of tools designed to help online retailers measure the financial impact of their social media activity.

It seems we hear about such a product being launched almost every week nowadays, but PowerReviews is one of the Web’s largest social commerce networks and helps more than 5,500 brands tap into their customers’ conversations. This is worth looking into further.

The Essential Social Suite (ESS) enables e-commerce merchants to promote, reward and measure customer engagement and content generation to better meet their business objectives. Retailers are able to transcend the fleetingness of a Facebook Like to optimize on-site social activity and drive more website traffic, customer engagement and sales.

ESS integrates all three components of social success – content, engagement and measurement – by including the following product features:

Social Content: Generates three times more product-related social content, including customer reviews and Q&As. This content is incredibly effective at driving conversion rates and powering improved SEO that generates 10 to 50 percent more organic site traffic.

• Social Answers: Drives conversion and SEO by ensuring that customer questions are answered within 24 hours.

Social Engagement: Amplifies social content across the Web by giving a brand’s most valuable customers the tools to connect and contribute to the community.

• Social Loyalty: Uses gamification to create the social content and sharing activity that drives traffic, conversions and sales.
• Social Discovery and Community: Drives organic traffic from social networks and connects shoppers with a brand’s best advocates.

Social Measurement: Precisely measures the sales impact of social activity with a powerful analytics engine. A single, integrated platform means that on-site social activity is optimized to drive traffic, conversion and revenue. Helps to answer key questions such as, “Which type of shared content creates the most organic traffic?” and “Which type of engagement is most likely to drive a conversion?”

Visit PowerReviews for more information on the Essential Social Suite.

Pinterest Optimization for Internet Retailers

Linc Wonham — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 21:00:00 GMT

Virtual pinboard Pinterest is the hottest thing on the Web right now. That means that it deserves the attention of merchants and marketers as well as the millions of users who have made it one of the fastest-growing websites in history.

Some of the most recent numbers indicate that Pinterest currently drives more referral traffic than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined, and that 9 percent of the top 300 online retailers are offering “Pin it” buttons on their own sites. That’s compared to about 60 percent who have Facebook Like buttons and 20 percent who have Google+ buttons – and Pinterest was a relatively unknown commodity until just recently.

The point is that an enormous opportunity awaits e-commerce merchants who understand how to leverage the popularity of Pinterest by utilizing the service itself as well as the rising number of ancillary tools. Here are some tips on how to do exactly that:

Get initiated
If you’re still unsure of what all the buzz is about, here’s a quick review of what Pinterest is, followed by how it can generate revenue for Web retailers. It is a social “pinboarding” site on which users share images with one another by “pinning” them onto their “boards”. Users can create multiple boards and give them specific themes, and other users can follow the boards in which they are most interested, sharing their favorite pins with still others by “repinning” them, liking them and adding comments.

The actual images or pins on each board can link back to a retailer’s online store, which is why many of today’s top brands are using Pinterest to display their products, create awareness and build communities of targeted, qualified users. That last part is of critical importance for merchants – visitors who land on retail websites by way of Pinterest are generally highly targeted potential customers who have already shown an interest in a specific product, category or brand; more so, in fact, than most users who share products on Facebook and Twitter.

This is what makes Pinterest such a potential gold mine for merchants, and here is how to optimize for the best results.

Add “Pin it” buttons to your online store
As mentioned above, about 28 of the top 300 Internet retailers have already done this, but expect that number to rise dramatically in the very near future. Pinterest users will have Pin it bookmarks on their own computers’ browsers, but this simple step is a must for merchants who want to get the best results out of the Pinterest experience. One more reminder to visitors of your online store that your product images are available for pinning can go a long way toward attracting and converting new customers.

Get creative with your use of images
If you have been delaying that update to your product catalog or website design, do not put them off any longer. Pinterest offers a rapidly growing community with which to share your images, but not just any images or use of imagery will do. Poor-quality, outdated or uninteresting product photos may even have the opposite effect and drive users away from your store rather than to it. Make sure that you offer a wide selection of photos that properly illustrates the different styles in which your products are available (see example).

And product images are hardly all we’re talking about, so start getting creative and generous with your overall use of imagery. Add compelling photos to each and every blog post and pin the images to Pinterest; update the “About” section of your website with photos of staff members and pin them to Pinterest; involve your customers in the process and ask them to submit their own photos of themselves with your products, perhaps as part of a contest, and pin them to Pinterest; take photos at industry events and your own company events and pin those to Pinterest, too. These are just a few ideas for how to get more serious about images and video than you may have been up to this point.

Take advantage of your tracking and referral data
Through Google Analytics, merchants can easily determine what referral traffic is arriving via Pinterest as well as keeping track of individual pins. This information can be used to determine the most popular items on your board that are receiving the most pins and how many actual conversions are resulting in each case. Based on this data, retailers can experiment with time-sensitive sales for Pinterest users or offer discounts for the products that users are pinning the most – and/or rewards for the most active pinners among your Pinterest community.

Don’t be a stranger
The most successful merchants on Pinterest are going to be the ones who actually use it the way other users do, and not strictly as a marketing vehicle. So have fun with it and interact with the community, and don’t be a stranger who drops in every once in a while. Get in the habit of spending some part of every day on the site, and also in the habit of pinning every interesting, fun and/or engaging photo or video that you come across. You won’t really be a part of the community if your only interactions are dropping by every other week to pin a new product photo. One way to ensure that you have a community of users from the start is by encouraging your existing customers to take the Pinterest plunge along with you, and build out from there. Another way to increase your Pinterest street cred is by playing on both sides of the ball, i.e. make sure that you are helping other users by pinning their photos and videos rather than just idly sitting by and waiting for users to pin your content.

Don’t stop at Pinterest
Just as the daily deals craze began with Groupon but then grew exponentially larger than the company behind it, the pinboarding craze has more than a good chance to outgrow just Pinterest. In fact, that process has already begun with sites such as Chill, a pinboarding site for video only, and tools such as this one for Joomla users and these WordPress plugins. Many retailers went this route at the height of the daily deals buzz and have enjoyed great success by running their own versions of deals sites, but at the very least you should keep an eye on the increasing number of Pinterest clones out there and give some of them a try as well.

ShopIgniter Fires Up for the Retail Enterprise

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 17:30:00 GMT

There has been some serious discussion lately about the viability of Facebook-related commerce. To get caught up, read WM's post Solving the Facebook Merchant Exodus.

Whether you're a believer now in f-commerce or not, it's hard to imagine the social network without an e-commerce component in the future. One of the reasons many larger retailers and brands have been hesitant (and which may be preventing broader adoption) is related to the issue of security. Gradually, merchants are seeing solutions emerge that slowly address the issue. Case in point, social commerce software ShopIgniter announced the availability of an enterprise-scale platform last week designed specifically for Internet retailers.

The social commerce platform from ShopIgniter is one of the first solutions to deliver an "integrated" set of e-commerce experiences, including Group Gifting and seamless Facebook purchases, but it doesn't stop there. The offering is wrapped in a technology infrastructure that offers full integration with existing retail software systems and more importantly addresses the rigorous security requirements of businesses. Retailers including Levi's, Target, Nike Golf, Kaenon and others have sophisticated technology requirements for their commerce operations, particularly PCI Level 1 certification.

"Customers expect, and brands demand, the same level of security and confidence when buying through social channels as they do on their eCommerce stores," says Matt Compton, CEO of ShopIgniter. "By adding PCI Level 1 certification to our Social Commerce Platform, we're proud to offer brands and retailers the most complete social commerce offering on the market, with peace of mind that their transactions and data are completely secure."

Security is certainly important to big name retailers, but it’s the features that will likely drive usage long term. The highlight of the platform for many merchants is sure to be the group gifting capabilities. The system uses Facebook's built-in friend lists and messages to coordinate a unique, social purchasing flow -- and then processes multiple contributions for a single transaction. What will separate f-commerce solution providers from one another is in the ability to create a variety of experiences for their users. In addition to group gifting, SI clients can create programs for new product launches, special offers for key customers, flash/private sales and even seasonal and holiday collections.

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.

WordPress Plugin for Social Commerce from Demandware

Administrator — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 16:30:00 GMT

Emerging from its experimental research lab, SaaS e-commerce solution provider Demandware has released a new WordPress plugin that provides retailers with a way to bring some social into the world of commerce.

Powered by Demandware’s Open Commerce APIs, the plugin allows retailers to tag text and images with product details from the Demadware Commerce platform and bring the shopping experience into the blog experience. When users hover over product names and images, consumers are served details about the product. The plug-in can be customized to meet brand design, and retails can even extend the app using the capabilities within Demandware’s customization environment.

“Blogging is a critical channel for building a stronger connection between the consumer and the brand,” says Jamus Driscoll, senior vice president of marketing for Demandware. “With Demandware’s new WordPress Plug-In, powered by our Open Commerce APIs, merchants can deliver the same vivid product descriptions and images found on its ecommerce site directly into its company blog to further connect with its most engaged consumers.”

The plugin is available now but only to Demandware clients for testing and implementation.