Facebook’s Trojan Horse Commerce Strategy

If you were to ask the question, “What is Facebook?”, you might get a variety of different answers: A social network, a communication platform, a content aggregator and so on. Yet one thing Facebook isn’t — yet — is an e-commerce player. But it’s arguable that much of what Facebook has been building over the last several years amounts to a Trojan horse strategy to become one. Rather than entering Amazon’s market directly, Facebook has been building the scaffolding around its e-commerce business, and doing everything but actually introducing ways to buy things across Facebook. Given how Amazon tends to respond to direct threats to its business, this may be one of the smartest things Facebook has done in its history.