Social commerce

In reduced demand times and recession periods new business trends rise. We can say indeed that critical situations push the market to findo innovative ways to find andwers.

It’s the case of social commerce, the new consumer frontier in a future key. Although, especially in Italy, a considerable part of the public isn’t still used to e-commerce, all over the world it’s spoken about f-commerce, where “f” is for Facebook: the most important and most commercially exploitable social network nowadays.

Surely every user noticed the fast-growing ads presence ( based on our action and preferences) inside our pages: it’s clear that many companies has understood the potential of this communication.

The step that is up to come is to switch from simple activities/products/services report to 360 business relationships management. Beyond an increased pre-shopping stage, a mechanism of direct selling and post-shopping interaction is starting.

This is one of the most significant  points for business trend because it allows an effective feedbacks collection which is useful to set modifies and strategies about market approach.

The advantages of finding interesting stuff and buy it on a social network are evident:  for users it’s good to have an easy way to find informations and the opportunity to skip some intermerdiaries like in e-commerce and, last but not least, the possibility to share choices with friends and contacts like a virtual shopping tour. A lot of people usually relies on friends and relatives when it’s time to make purchases, asks for advices, experiences and everything that could help in make the final decision.

Watching from business side advantages focus on targeted marketing, use word of mouth and virality, reach a bigger public than conventional tecniques ( unless with expensive investments), target profiling and creation of loyalty via post-selling relationships.

For the moment the easiest part to develop is the so-called “pre shopping”, that is to say ideas and opinions sharing, discussions creation after our purchases or the ones made by friends. Here through word of mouth is possible to create the social relationships that generate traffic and value.

Many companies involeved in e-commerce are watching with interest at these devolopments: for example Ebay has recently released the “x commerce” platform that assembles Ebay, PayPal, Magento and GSI. The concept is to offer devolpers an open e commerce solution over which they can create new applications to let social commerce be the next big thing.

Meanwhile Ebay is joining forces with Facebook just to explore every single way: in the new Open Graph Magento and GSI will be included, so brand pages could count on new business opportunities.

This is without any doubt another bet, a further addiction to enforce the multimedial experience of a social network that was born to share contents and now is a universe all-accomplished.