Is Facebook a Player in eCommerce or Not? - Page 2
Amazon, for instance, now has a browser plug-in that allows you to shop for virtually anything on the Web through your Amazon Wish List. It's that kind of functionality, plus the growing trend of Facebook sharing, that is creating what can now properly be called Social Shopping.
The Growing Number of FB Tools for Shopping
Other Facebook-specific tools are popping up and facilitating shopping on the site. Full ecommerce storefronts, social plugin integration tools, etc. are everywhere. Things like Payvment, 8thBridge, Beetailer, and Zibaba are proliferating. There are even Facebook-integrated shopping malls of various websites banded together.
Big shopping portals like Amazon and eBay are creating Facebook-powered recommendation engines that go beyond the 'Like' button and create a sort of Social Shopping experience.
So Who's Benefiting and How?
There are a lot of companies that are doing quite well thanks to Facebook integration. Ticket sellers like Ticketmaster, which says that every time someone shares one of their events on Facebook they average $5.30 in higher sales. Eventbrite also showed a $2.52 increase in sales per share.
Amazon.com shows an increase in referral traffic through Facebook of 328% year-on-year while their Google referrals declined by 2%.
Those are just a couple of examples. The trend is clear and growing. No, it's not the Social Shopping utopia that has been oft-predicted, but it's gaining and will obviously become a powerful way to market and shop in the near future.
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