3 Best Practices for Facebook Ecommerce Success

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)

Facebook eCommerce Best Practices www.gigya.com

 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)
”Invest in
 Facebook, blogs, Twitter and customer reviews are
Facebook
considered the most effective tactics for mobilizing
integration
consumers to talk up products online. (Etailing survey of 117
both on
companies, September 2009)
your site
and off to  On Black Friday 2010, there were more than 6x the number
tap the of Facebook status updates related to retail purchases as on
power of the previous Friday (Facebook, January 2011)
social
while
Facebook in particular has become increasingly important to
creating a
retailers in the past year. Half of the top 25 retailers have integrated
customer
Facebook into their own sites, as have 17 of the fastest growing 25
experience
retailers, a telling statistic. In 2010 Facebook created a new team to
that
work with retailers and help them best leverage Facebook Platform
supports
products such as the Like button and login to drive business.
your
brand”
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

Facebook eCommerce Best Practices www.gigya.com 2

#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


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
”2011 is consistent brand experience for your customers wherever they are,
the year of and in getting the most out of your entire social investment.
integrating
social with At the most basic level, integrating Facebook into your own retail
the site means you don’t have to “send your customers away” to be
corporate social. You can add social context and create a loop between
site - don’t Facebook and your site without distracting consumers from the
send your
shopping process. Most retailers have a significant investment in
customers
search marketing programs, and keeping people on the site is a
away to be
cardinal rule.
social”

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.

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


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
”Tried and you connect with these word-of-mouth advocates is not just a nice
true online to have, it’s a must-have1.
retail best
practices #2 Design for the best of ecommerce and social both on your
still apply site and off
when Tried and true eCommerce best practices still apply when designing
designing a commerce experience on Facebook.com, just as social best
your practices still apply when integrating social features into your
commerce
website. JCPenney has a history of running innovative social
experience
campaigns on Facebook, and has proven they are not afraid to
on
iterate quickly and learn how best to engage customers and
Facebook.
potential customers wherever they are. The company recently
com”
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

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

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

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
”Social and data during the sign-up process, with shopper permission.
Commerce
expertise is Personalization and social context
rapidly Social technologies enable personalization and social context for
converging products, ratings and reviews. For example, what products have my
– major friends reviewed or rated? JCPenney could also provide product
commerce recommendations based on a person’s Likes and the Likes of his or
platforms her friends.
are
integrating
Social shopping features
social
Enabling people to shop together with friends, create wish lists, or
modules in
ask friends about specific products could truly tap into the power of
early 2011”
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


usability experts to deliver social features seamlessly to their own
websites and wherever their customers are on the web.

”Close the #3 Close the loop to enable seamless shopping
loop with Retailers have rapidly embraced the “Like” button on their websites
Facebook to drive word-of-mouth. But providing seamless social shopping
shoppers means recognizing people as customers as well as Facebook users
by wherever they are. To do so effectively, retailers can develop
enabling ongoing communications to reach those customers while they are
social-sign- spending time on Facebook, as well as incorporate powerful
on to personalization activity into their own sites. For multi-channel
power site
retailers, this can also include web to in-store promotions.
registration
and other
Targeted communications on Facebook
social
When consumers click the Like buton next to a product, it can open
features”
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.


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,


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
”Only when ways.
a shopper
chooses to When retailers enable their customers and visitors to connect with
sign-in with their real identity and friends through Facebook, it opens up a wide
Facebook range of opportunities. With social plugins, sites can gather
information anonymous and aggregated data from people who have clicked the
can that Like button and garner insights to help in customization, but they
site access do not have access to those people as individuals, i.e. they cannot
individual
access individual demographic or other profile or social data. It is
Likes and
only when a shopper chooses to sign-in to the site with their
other data”
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.


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

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