Monday, January 28, 2013

Is F-Commerce really working?

Facebook Commerce (or F-commerce as it is colloquially known), the practice of buying items within the walls of Fortress Facebook, took a knock today. The slightly unsurprising news is that the Social Network transaction platform Payvment is closing soon and handing over its customers to a competitor. This removes a key player from the market and will be a sore lesson to those that put up the $8m investment.

F-commerce for over a year now has been heralded as the new wave of online retail. However the hype and the reality haven't come together in an online proposition that really works for most purchases. It's fair to say that Facebook does not always work for all kinds of online commerce situations.

Even Payvment's CEO recently stated: "Social product discovery and social commerce have very little in common with the considered purchase process" 

What this means is that Social commerce is apparently better at delivering impulse purchases for products or services that the user wasn't necessarily looking for. Meaning that more expensive items that have a longer purchase cycle than just 'see it, like it, buy it'  aren't suited to F-commerce.

Payvment's CEO Jim Stoneham gives more details in his interview here allthingsd.com/20130128/payvment-pulls-the-plug-on-facebook-commerce however insiders and analysts must surely now be looking at the other players in the market to see how they fare.

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