Facebook's eCommerce Plans
Inspired by an article by Paul Marsden on socialcommercetoday, I thought about facebook going social commerce and about Paul’s statements in his article.
I suppose a universal payment system on facebook is a must not an option. Performance of facebook has in recent months been fairly poor from time to time, so an additonal source of income would certainly help cover the enormous maintenance costs and hopefully improve performance. Just as back in the days when fb was a really lean community. I keep wondering if maybe fb is not growing at too fast a pace.
But you are perfectly right that commerce will have to go where the potential buyers are – either in terms of ad placements or cleverly integrated into portals. And I am also dead sure that Amazon will move closer to facebook. At the end of the day people want convenience. Why leave your web 2.0 home facebook to go shopping at amazon.com or elsewhere with all the numerous different logins? Instead, you could stay among your peers and even virtually shop together. This is actually what many of us already do using online stores and discussing products via MSN and Skype.
If you ask me, that will be the next step. Commerce will be social just as in real life.
As to performance – yeah right, it might slow down again if you embedd Amazon et al.
