Editor’s note: This article was first published in February 2012. This news piece is based on a Bloomberg report of 17 February 2012. Facebook has since launched its own shopping features, so the outlook for F-commerce described here is out of date.
Your business needs to be online, and it needs to know how to make the most of its presence on Facebook. It’s a message we keep sending to entrepreneurs and business owners. In fact, several apps for integrating your online store into the big social network have appeared. However, according to a report by Bloomberg picked up by Mashable, more and more brands are closing their Facebook stores, because they’re losing time and money without getting the results they expected.
Brands had been sold the expectation that they could turn their thousands or millions of Facebook fans into a source of revenue. The idea could become reality through the various apps that build a store into the social network’s platform. Ashley Sheetz, vice president of marketing at GameStop, argued that Facebook should be used to keep up a conversation with users, not to try to sell, because trying to sell on Facebook is like trying to sell something to someone in a bar while they’re out with their friends.
Although Facebook has become a shop window for brands, the truth is that for now it isn’t a shopping mall people walk into intending to buy. Facebook isn’t yet built for that shopping experience.
That said, it can become a great source of traffic to websites, where users arrive in a much more receptive frame of mind for making a purchase. And if customers have a question, complaint or opinion, they can always get it across through Facebook.
Many users say they had sent complaints to brands by email or phoned asking for a solution to a particular problem, and only when they wrote the complaint on the company’s Facebook wall did they get a quick response, because brands are very aware that they need to look after their image on social networks.
When a store lacks search engine visibility, Facebook can become, as some retail brands already say, the main source of traffic for an online store.
Other marketing experts argue that the closure of Facebook stores may be down to a poor approach or sales strategy. Everyone knows e-commerce is the future, although users may not yet be ready for F-commerce.
Clearly this experience isn’t universal: although a high percentage of brands are giving up on selling through Facebook, others are having a positive experience for now, so it could obviously depend as much on the sales strategy as on the product being sold.
Featured image: BornToZucc, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
