The advent of some high profile ecommerce sites on Facebook, such as 1-800-Flowers and Disney’s Toy Story 3 ticket application, have sparked a debate about whether to build duplicate ecommerce sites (or subsets) on Facebook itself.
Ecommerce applications on Facebook have typically been promotional in nature, in support of a product launch or a specific promotion. Facebook has become a widely adopted alternative to building a promotional microsite. But in most cases, these microsites lead to the full ecommerce site for the transaction.
1-800-Flowers and others have built applications that enable Facebook visitors to purchase on Facebook. So given this, SeeWhy set out to research what marketers are planning to do.
On June 15th, SeeWhy surveyed 476 marketers and asked about their plans for social commerce, i.e., the use of social media to drive ecommerce sales.
We found that three quarters of marketers (76 percent) plan to leverage Facebook for ‘social commerce’ initiatives. A further 20 percent are not yet sure, while only 2 percent have no plans to leverage Facebook for social commerce.
Sixty-seven percent plan to leverage Facebook to drive traffic to their ecommerce website, while 26 percent plan to build ecommerce applications on Facebook itself. A further 44 percent plan to use Facebook applications in place of microsites for launches and specific promotions.
