F-Commerce: Setting Up Shop on Facebook

While this feature discusses how to incorporate a Facebook storefront into your long-term strategy, there's one caveat: In my opinion, it would be suicidal to even consider moving your company's entire e-commerce strategy and façade away from a self-hosted website and onto a third-party site like Facebook. You need to maintain as much control as possible of your own brand equity and identity, transactions, copyright issues, and inventory during the process of expanding to Facebook or other third-party storefront opportunities. As was done with "web-only" items years ago, consider Facebook-only items or limit your Facebook store to certain items or specials. There's no need to put your entire product catalog on Facebook.

Certainly part of the rationale is that on Facebook, the primary brand associated with activities is Facebook itself, not your brand. Interaction with consumers via Facebook can and will build relationships for brands, but everything hosted on Facebook is identified with the Facebook brand — again, not yours. The best way to use Facebook is to take advantage of its traffic, audience, demographic and plethora of engaged consumers to further develop your relationship and eventually push e-commerce transactions over to your website. Given your brand equity and investment levels over time, isn't this how you'd prefer it?

How to Do It
For established merchants, a Facebook storefront offers yet another way to put product in front of consumers, increase sales, and support new customer acquisition strategies and tactics. There are two ways to do this:

• use a shopping application that allows consumers to purchase items from you without leaving Facebook; or
• use a shopping application that begins the shopping experience on Facebook but then transitions over to the brand's e-commerce site.

There are free and paid apps available. For basic e-commerce options, free applications are the way to go. Planning a larger, glitzier, more public relations-focused effort? Considering employing a custom solution.

Storefronts That Stay on Facebook
Several Facebook applications let retailers sell items on Facebook without making shoppers leave the social networking site. 1-800-Flowers.com uses Alvenda's (now 8thBridge) Shoplet feature to allow its fans to select, purchase and ship items without leaving the floral retailer's Facebook page. Alvenda and Fluid both offer custom shop-like programs that load JavaScript on Facebook tabs. This allows retailers to conduct commerce through their own merchant accounts while remaining within the Facebook framework.

Payvment offers a Facebook app that allows retailers to create free Facebook shops. A unique aspect of Payvment's offering is that it allows consumers to shop all Payvment stores on Facebook and keep items in their cart while browsing other shops on Facebook. Since products can be carried through the sometimes erratic path that individuals take while interacting with Facebook, there's a better chance that those items will eventually be purchased. PayPal handles all Payvment stores' transactions. This takes the responsibility of managing transactions away from the retailer and moves it to a third-party provider.