Facebook Commerce: Should Big Brands Follow Lead of the Little Guys?

  • Since Facebook has been striving to monetize its mobile efforts, the social giant took some heat earlier this year when big retailers such as Gamestop, Nordstrom and JC Penney shut down their Facebook stores.
  • Working with Ecwid, the second largest store-building application on Facebook, VentureBeat finds that Facebook store commerce is in fact working, but mostly for small- to medium-sized businesses.
  • “We started pulling data from the over 40,000 Ecwid accounts globally that have active stores on both a website and on Facebook,” the post explains. “For the second quarter of this year, we found that 22.1 percent of those orders came from the Facebook store. That’s up from 17.3 percent in Q1. These are impressive figures, especially when you consider they’ve grown from 15 percent in 2011 when we first started tracking this.”
  • Smaller businesses seem to have a better understanding of how social networks work, according to the analysis. These companies can convey a more personal tone in social conversations, be more flexible to incorporate new store-building technologies and build up their community — rather than just “product hawking.”
  • “[Small- to medium- businesses] more effectively integrate their stores into the flow of the conversation,” the post adds. “Dropping a store into a social news stream has to be done carefully. The purpose of social networks is to connect people, so an ill-timed sales offer can be a turnoff.”
  • The bigger companies could learn a thing or two from the smaller businesses. “Since the rules of this game are still being written, it’s important to pay attention to who’s figuring it out first,” suggests VentureBeat.

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