3 best practices for facebook ecommerce success

Facebook eCommerce Best Practices www.gigya.com

3 Best Practices for Facebook

eCommerce Success

Social Strategies for Online Retailers

Rapidly or reluctantly, retailers are adding social channels and tools

to their arsenal, urged on by customers and competitors who are

already using them.

But these are not the only forces driving retailers towards social

commerce. No longer hype, the opportunity for word-of-mouth

customer referrals driven by social context and a shared shopping

experience is simply too large to ignore:

67% of shoppers spend more online after recommendations

from online community of friends (Internet Retailer,

September 2009)


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53% of people on Twitter recommend companies and/or

products in their Tweets, with 48% of them delivering on

their intention to buy the product. (ROI Research for

Performance, June 2010)

Facebook, blogs, Twitter and customer reviews are

considered the most effective tactics for mobilizing

consumers to talk up products online. (Etailing survey of 117

companies, September 2009)

On Black Friday 2010, there were more than 6x the number

of Facebook status updates related to retail purchases as on

the previous Friday (Facebook, January 2011)

Facebook in particular has become increasingly important to

retailers in the past year. Half of the top 25 retailers have integrated

Facebook into their own sites, as have 17 of the fastest growing 25

retailers, a telling statistic. In 2010 Facebook created a new team to

work with retailers and help them best leverage Facebook Platform

products such as the Like button and login to drive business.

There are a plethora of powerful tools, but three best practices will

help you effectively tap that power while creating a customer

experience that appropriately reflects your brand.

1. Invest equally in integrating Facebook into your own

site as in Facebook.com

2. Incorporate ecommerce and social best practices both

on your site and on Facebook.com

3. Close the loop to enable seamless shopping

”Invest in

Facebook

integration

both on

your site

and off to

tap the

power of

social

while

creating a

customer

experience

that

supports

your

brand”


3

#1 Invest equally in integrating Facebook for your own site as

in Facebook.com

Why is it important to invest equally in your on-Facebook and off-

Facebook social strategy? According to Facebook, a combination of

on-site and off-site Facebook tools and technologies can create a

“social recommendations engine that personalizes sites and powers

word of mouth at scale.” Most retailers are comfortable with

running a variety of promotions on their Facebook Page, but less

comfortable with using Facebook tools on their own sites. The

discrepancy is illustrated below, with 91% of retailers surveyed

using or planning to use a Facebook Page, but significantly fewer

looking at integrating Facebook (formerly “Facebook Connect”) for

their own sites.

An important area of focus for 2011 is on making the rest of the web

as social as Facebook. In a December interview, Ethan Beard,

Director of Facebook Developer Network told Internet Retailer

“We’re not trying to recreate the Internet on Facebook.com. In fact, I

spend most of time working with people to socialize the web


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outside of our site.” Altimeter analyst Jeremiah Owyang calls 2011

“the year of integrating social with the corporate site.”

Investing equally in social for your own site is the path to creating a

consistent brand experience for your customers wherever they are,

and in getting the most out of your entire social investment.

At the most basic level, integrating Facebook into your own retail

site means you don’t have to “send your customers away” to be

social. You can add social context and create a loop between

Facebook and your site without distracting consumers from the

shopping process. Most retailers have a significant investment in

search marketing programs, and keeping people on the site is a

cardinal rule.

Consider the following examples. In the first, visitors to Macys.com

who want to “like” the Macys brand must click the “Facebook” icon,

which redirects the browser window to the Macys brand Page on

Facebook.com. That shopper then has to click “Like” on the Macys

Facebook Page, then hit the “back” button on the browser or re-

navigate to the Macys.com site to return to their original path. This

process leaves a lot of opportunity to be distracted from the original

destination and intention. In the second example, Gap.com has

implemented the Facebook Like Box plugin. A visitor to Gap.com

simply clicks the “Like” button and the process is completed

without any additional clicks, creating a connection to the Gap

Facebook Page seamlessly, and most importantly keeps the person

on the site. This is a win-win for Gap and its customers, enabling

both to establish a new relationship and a new communication

channel on Facebook, without distracting from the shopping

process.

”2011 is

the year of

integrating

social with

the

corporate

site - don’t

send your

customers

away to be

social”


5

While this is a very simple integration example, it is representative

of why it is important to get the balance of on-site and off-site social


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right. According to Facebook, people who click the Like button on

external sites have 2.4x the number of friends than the average

Facebook user, and click on 5.3x more external links, so ensuring

you connect with these word-of-mouth advocates is not just a nice

to have, it’s a must-have1.

#2 Design for the best of ecommerce and social both on your

site and off

Tried and true eCommerce best practices still apply when designing

a commerce experience on Facebook.com, just as social best

practices still apply when integrating social features into your

website. JCPenney has a history of running innovative social

campaigns on Facebook, and has proven they are not afraid to

iterate quickly and learn how best to engage customers and

potential customers wherever they are. The company recently

launched their full catalog as a store on Facebook, which is

embedded as an app within the company’s Facebook page.

While JCPenney deserves kudos for many features, there remains a

significant gap between the shopping experience on Facebook and

that on JCPenney.com. Important (and best practice) information

needed for purchase conversion, like size charts, fabric content, and

care instructions is missing, e.g. what age child does that size M

boys swimsuit correspond to? Out of stock notifications don’t come

until after placing an item into your bag. One of the app’s strengths

is the ability for existing JCPenney.com customers to checkout using

their existing JCPenney.com account, an important best practice.

The core shopping user experience and associated best practices

are retailers’ strengths to leverage in a social context.

1 http://on.fb.me/fjeexJ

”Tried and

true online

retail best

practices

still apply

when

designing

your

commerce

experience

on

Facebook.

com”

http://on.fb.me/fjeexJ


7

The JCPenney shopping app includes solid social sharing

functionality, such as the Like button and Comments plugin, which

displays the shopper’s profile picture and enables that person to

share comments about products to their profile and friends.

Social features that JCPenney could add to further enrich both their

shopping app on Facebook.com and their own website include:

Applying social data to streamline the checkout process

Tapping into a shopper’s profile data to streamline the checkout

process can increase conversion and improve the user experience.

When JCPenney launched the shopping app, it asked for

permissions upfront, but the company pulled the permission step

off when people balked at some of the requests. Facebook best

practices are to only ask for permissions at the time they are

needed, to ask only for the data needed, and to provide a clear

explanation2. For example, JCPenney could ask for access to a

2 To learn more about best practices for using social data, visit: http://info.gigya.com/Whitepaper-Social-Data.html


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shopper’s profile data at the time a new account is created, and

include an explanation about how that data will be used. Facebook

has also recently released a Registration plugin to help sites capture

data during the sign-up process, with shopper permission.

Personalization and social context

Social technologies enable personalization and social context for

products, ratings and reviews. For example, what products have my

friends reviewed or rated? JCPenney could also provide product

recommendations based on a person’s Likes and the Likes of his or

her friends.

Social shopping features

Enabling people to shop together with friends, create wish lists, or

ask friends about specific products could truly tap into the power of

the social graph people maintain on Facebook. This would provide

an additional opportunity for JCPenney to ask for permissions that

shoppers would readily give in exchange for a valuable user

experience.

Game Mechanics

Adding elements of game mechanics, which are essentially social

rewards programs, to existing frequent shopper programs can

increase margins. Alternating virtual and monetary rewards, like

expedited shipping and fun virtual goods, for taking actions like

sharing products with friends is just one possibility.

Social and eCommerce expertise is rapidly converging. In early

2011, major ecommerce platform vendors will make modules

available that are built in conjunction with social technology and

”Social and

Commerce

expertise is

rapidly

converging

– major

commerce

platforms

are

integrating

social

modules in

early 2011”


9

usability experts to deliver social features seamlessly to their own

websites and wherever their customers are on the web.

#3 Close the loop to enable seamless shopping

Retailers have rapidly embraced the “Like” button on their websites

to drive word-of-mouth. But providing seamless social shopping

means recognizing people as customers as well as Facebook users

wherever they are. To do so effectively, retailers can develop

ongoing communications to reach those customers while they are

spending time on Facebook, as well as incorporate powerful

personalization activity into their own sites. For multi-channel

retailers, this can also include web to in-store promotions.

Targeted communications on Facebook

When consumers click the Like buton next to a product, it can open

up a communication channel between the site and that consumer on

Facebook. If the Like button has been integrated through the Open

Graph protocol, the site can publish information directly to the

Facebook News Feed of all the individuals who have liked the

product, and target that information – new products or sales for

example – based on the type of item that was liked. Levis, one of the

earliest adopters of the Like button, found that this new channel

was an extremely effective way to not only reach a younger and

typically elusive target audience, but to drive them to their retail

site.

”Close the

loop with

Facebook

shoppers

by

enabling

social-sign-

on to

power site

registration

and other

social

features”


10

Below, Levis can now easily let the shoppers who liked these jeans

know that they are on sale:

Site personalization

Perhaps the greatest potential impact comes from closing the loop

with Facebook users via Social Sign-on. Facebook consumers in

particular are aware that they can use their Facebook credentials to

register or sign-in around the web, as on GiantNerd.com, an online

retailer of high-end outdoor equipment.

Giant Nerd has integrated with Facebook, via the Gigya service, to

enable Facebook shoppers to register and sign-in, share content,


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and participate in the GiantNerd community to earn both social and

monetary rewards. The site taps into profile data Facebook users

have shared to personalize the shopping experience in a variety of

ways.

When retailers enable their customers and visitors to connect with

their real identity and friends through Facebook, it opens up a wide

range of opportunities. With social plugins, sites can gather

anonymous and aggregated data from people who have clicked the

Like button and garner insights to help in customization, but they

do not have access to those people as individuals, i.e. they cannot

access individual demographic or other profile or social data. It is

only when a shopper chooses to sign-in to the site with their

Facebook information that a retailer can access to individual data,

and can recognize that person uniquely to provide a more

personalized shopping experience. Amazon does this quite

effectively with their Facebook integration, displaying product

recommendations based on customer “likes” as well as friends’

“likes.” The site also displays a list of Facebook friends with

upcoming birthdays, and makes gift recommendations.

”Only when

a shopper

chooses to

sign-in with

Facebook

information

can that

site access

individual

Likes and

other data”


12

Multi-channel retailers

Seamless shopping can now cross channels. Facebook has always

enabled innovative promotional opportunities on Facebook.com

that drive to retail sites. Now they have released a mobile Deals

product, enabling merchants to offer Facebook users deals as

individuals, or together with friends, that are redeemed at bricks

and mortar stores.

2011 is expected to be a breakout year for social commerce,

bringing together the expertise of the retail and social ecosystems

to deliver technologies, services and programs that impact the retail

bottom line.

About Gigya, Inc

Gigya is a software-as-a-service technology that unifies the most

popular identity and social providers including Facebook, Twitter,

PayPal and LinkedIn and brings the features and benefits to

corporate websites. Gigya enables businesses to deepen customer

relationships and tap existing friend networks, driving social

registrations, word of mouth at scale, and social interaction for

websites and applications. In addition, Gigya provides analytics,

best practices, consulting and support to optimize every

implementation. Supporting more than 280 million users each

month across more than 500,000 sites, Gigya’s technology is the

choice of global leaders in publishing and commerce including CBS,

Fox Sports, Intuit, The Coca-Cola Company, The Home Depot, and

Turner Networks. Gigya is a leading company in the Social CRM

market, which Gartner forecasts to reach $600 million this year.

3 best practices for facebook ecommerce success

Technology

facebook icon

site asin facebook

facebook social strategy

macys facebook page

gap facebook page

offsite facebook tools

social best practices

social context