Mitchell Harper is co-founder of BigCommerce, a leading provider of shopping cart software used by more than 40,000 organizations worldwide. Mitchell has written and published over 300 articles relating to software development, marketing, business, social media and entrepreneurship.
After watching Mark Zuckerberg’s recent keynote at the Facebook F8 developers conference, it is clear that Facebook is looking to become the standard in social personalization for everything you do online. And the new social features and direction that they announced will undoubtedly have an impact on the broader world of e-commerce.
For example, their new “Like” button is already visible on over 50,000 websites, and they’re providing an API-based way to access what they’re calling a user’s “Open Graph,” which is a list of everything he or she has “liked” across the entire web – music, books, restaurants, food and more.
The Facebook Standard
Now here’s the fun part: Using Facebook’s API, a website can take your interests and use them to personalize your browsing experience. Better still, they don’t even have to prompt you to login to your Facebook account, thanks to the new auto-authentication feature which already lets sites like Yelp, IMDb and Pandora pull in your Open Graph data.
Until a few weeks ago, it may have sounded crazy to think that Facebook would become the standard when it comes to website personalization. But as each day goes by, it’s looking like that’s exactly what will happen.
Although there’s been concern about privacy, in my opinion, personalization will end up boosting the online shopping experience for consumers, and will provide some powerful opportunities for savvy e-commerce companies.
What This Means for E-commerce
Here are my five predictions for how that will happen.
1. Amazon won’t be the only online store with sophisticated personalization. Considering anyone (with permission) can pull your Open Graph via Facebook’s API, this information can be used to personalize an online store based on your past purchases, likes, and preferences quite easily. For example, our company is already working on a way to personalize the “Featured Products” area on the home page of our merchant’s stores based on their visitor’s “likes” from Facebook.
2. Facebook will start driving more traffic to some online stores than Google. With tighter Facebook integration comes more sharing by shoppers. For example, if you login to your favorite online store using Facebook, that website can automatically post to your wall when you order, write a review, or “like” a product. According to Nielsen, 90% of people trust recommendations from people they know, and Facebook’s “like” button is the perfect way to recommend a product to a friend.
3. Google will adopt Facebook’s Open Graph protocol. When you’ve got more users than anyone else, and you make your platform open, as is the case with Facebook’s new announcements, your competitors (such as Google and MySpace) will follow your lead sooner or later. I predict that Google’s search results (including product search) will soon start displaying recommendations based on data available about you in the Open Graph protocol. For example, if you search for “comedy movie” and you’ve “liked” Austin Powers, Swingers, The Love Guru, Wayne’s World and Liar Liar on IMDb, then Google will be able to use your Open Graph data as well as their own personalization algorithms to display search results that are unique to you.
4. The Open Graph is laying the foundation for wider adoption of Facebook Credits. Imagine if you could buy at any online website using Facebook Credits. Similar to how PayPal works now, you wouldn’t have to share your credit card details, and could simply use credits to pay for anything and everything you buy online. Companies like PayPal should be worried about this. While Facebook Credits are only really popular with virtual goods now, it’s only a matter of time before they provide an open platform which developers can use to facilitate payments via Facebook.
5. E-commerce conversion rates will increase. Imagine if you were looking to buy a t-shirt online and right next to the “Add to Cart” button you saw that four of your friends (along with their names and photos) had already bought the same t-shirt. This kind of marketing is priceless – it brings instant social trust to that website. If you assume the average Facebook user has 200 friends, this type of social trust factor could be huge, and Facebook’s new recommendation and “like” tools will play a huge role.
What do you think Facebook’s new social tools mean for e-commerce? I’d love to see your comments below.
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More Facebook resources from Mashable:
– What Facebook’s Open Graph Means for Your Business
– How Facebook Can Become a Money Making Machine
– 5 Reasons Google and Search Won’t Dominate The Next Decade
– HOW TO: Disable Facebook’s “Instant Personalization” [PRIVACY]
– Facebook Open Graph: What it Means for Privacy
Tags: e-commerce, ecommerce, facebook, facebook open graph, List, Lists, online shopping, Open Graph, social media
