“The
more people buy online, the more people buy things they discover through their
mobile phones, the more people discover things from a News Feed and go on to
purchase, the more important we are in driving ecommerce and I think we are increasingly
important. That doesn’t mean we’re going to or have to sell products.”
Facebook
COO Sheryl Sandberg commenting a recent Facebook Shareholders Earnings Call on the
importance of Mobile E-Commerce to Facebook
Facebook had killed off their Gift Giving
services where you could buy physical gifts. This service was launched in 2012
via the purchase of a company named Karma that they’d purchased back in May
2012 as reported in my
blog article entitled “Facebook
acquires Karma and goes into Social Gifting - Six Degrees of Separation and The
Perks of Being a Wallflower”.
In
so doing they’ve erased any chance to become Amazon in spectacular fashion.
However,
they’re re-focusing more on their “Buy” button service that’ll allow anyone to
by any product they see without leaving Facebook
as mentioned in the article “Facebook Gifts is laid to rest”,
published July 29, 2014 7:08 PM PDT by Dara Kerr, CNET
News. They’re also working on some other goodies for the Mobile crowd that
dislikes punching in Credit Cards on their smartphones:
1. Autofill
with Facebook
2. Multi-Product
Ads
3. Custom
Audiences
4. Offline
Sales Measurement
Apparently
buying physical product via Facebook,
effectively making them a kind of Amazon for Mom and Pops as explained in “Send
your Facebook Friends real gifts through
their Timelines”, published September 27, 2012 2:07 PM PDT by Donna Tam, CNET News, just wasn’t working in Facebook’s favour.
Most
likely the sour notes were emanating from Facebook,
as many Facebook regulars disliked these
cheap gifts and creating a bad association with Facebook’s premium Social Messaging Brand,
as it looked as if they made their products. That and the fact that there is a
bit of logistics involved with handling shipping and who’s-to-blame- situations
if a product is faulty or a customer wants to return a product.
Clearly
Facebook Gifts wasn’t making money.
Facebook Gifts –
Concept gets the Kibosh as Facebook focuses on Buy Button to increase Transactions
So
they idea eventually got the kibosh only to be replaced with just selling gift
cards as noted in “Facebook
stops peddling physical gifts (no one wants)”, published August 23, 2013
2:53 PM PDT by Jennifer Van Grove, CNET News.
That’s now dead too, being replaced by this “buy” button.
Apparently
their purchasing interface probably wasn’t as slick as that of Amazon’s. So
they’ve decided to simply spruce it up with the Buy Button is which is the same
thing, just that you won’t leave Facebook
to do so. This suggest that this may be some kind of Mobile One-Click Purchase
service i.e. you pre-register your Credit Card with Facebook and then you click on the item you
wish to purchase on your smartphone.
Facebook is also launching an Autofill With
Facebook that stores Pre-loaded information
about your Credit Card that'll make One-click purchases a reality. That
information they're collecting to enable their payment gateway is aptly described
in my blog article entitled “How
Jamaicans can set up a Payment Gateway in order to process Credit Card
purchases - E-Commerce the main Catalys for Increasing Jamaica's Internet
Penetration” and is as listed below:
1. Sixteen
(16) Credit Card Numbers
2. Expiry
Date
3. Three
(3) digit CVV Code
4. Personal
information for the Customer i.e. Name, Address, telephone number
Nice
idea if it works, as scrolling up and down on a smartphone is a little
confusing at times; maybe some sidescroller action would make it easier and a
lot like using an Amazon Kindle Fire Tablet for shopping as noted in my Geezam blog article entitled “Amazon is
Legally Blonde as the Kindle Fire HD Upgrade is CEO Bezos’s Confessions of an
Online Shopaholic”.
Facebook
isn't stopping at just making shopping on your smartphone a lot more
convenient. It's also trying to reposition itself as a means of marketing
product to drive offline shopping too as well as help businesses with a Facebook
Page to drive offline purchases as well as noted in “Facebook
Is Shutting Down Gifts To Focus On Its Buy Button And Commerce Platform”,
published July 29, 2014 by Josh Constine, TechCrunch.
To
this end, they're using a service called Custom Audiences to gather data
metrics they've learned from their failed venture as well as current browsing
habits base on metadata from cookies when you log in to track you online
shopping or browsing related habits.
Then
armed with that data, businesses with Facebook
Pages can have marketing prompts sent to these casual browsers email’s or
Social Media Profiles persuading them to buy their products.
This
is really spam, but then again Amazon does the same thing in their Email as
well as on Twitter as any frequent users of Amazon would tell you.
This
translates to good business for Facebook
overall, as if they can then track these purchases and prove that persons are
buying more thanks to their Facebook
Pages and advertisings on Facebook,
businesses will buy more Ads.
Already
even on my desktop Facebook interface, the
drop down button now has an option to create a Page and place Advertisements,
as Facebook is getting more aggressive
with making money from businesses setting up Pages and buying Ad on Facebook.....just like Amazon or a
newspaper.
Facebook Buy Button for
Mobile – Facebook may face a Smurfberries-style Scandal similar to Apple
Facebook is trying to monetize their
popularity in a manner similar to Amazon, who only recently launched their
Amazon Fire smartphone that’s a shopaholic magic wand as opined in my Geezam blog article entitled “Amazon
Fire is a Volkswagen for Amazon Prime subscribers that’ll drive shop-on-the-go
Online Obsession”.
Something
tells me that this “buy” button is going to end up like the Smurfberries
scandal of Apple. For a bit of context, this involve a Smurfs game where you
had the option to buy smurfberries to progress more quickly in the game and go
higher in the game Levels as noted in “Apple
to refund at least $32.5M for kids' in-app purchases”, published January
15, 2014 9:24 AM PST by Lance Whitney, CNET
News.
Unfortunately,
once you’d decided to enable the one-click option, it basically charged your
credit card, even if you weren’t the one playing the game and especially if
your child knew your password to enable payments for the Credit Card that you’d
pre-loaded onto your Apple iPhone.
This
“Buy” button is the exact same concept, except that you’d also have to specify
where you want the item to be shipped, information that may also be pre-loaded
into the smartphone or Tablet.
Thus
Facebook hasn't really killed Facebook Gifts. Rather they've realize that
they make more money by encouraging businesses to set up Facebook Pages and buy advertising than selling
items themselves that was giving them a bad rap.
But
in the long run, they may end up getting smurfberried in their bid to make
their Stock Price pop.
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