Ashley Lutz
February 21, 2012
The Age
F-Commerce has not lived up to expectations.
Last April, Gamestop opened a store on Facebook to generate sales among the 3.5 million-plus customers who’d declared themselves “fans” of the video game retailer. Six months later, the store was quietly shuttered.
Gamestop has company. Over the past year, Gap, JC Penney and Nordstrom have all opened and closed storefronts on Facebook’s social networking site.
Facebook, which this month filed for an initial public offering, has sought to be a top shopping destination for its 845 million members. The stores’ quick failure shows that the California-based social network doesn’t drive commerce and casts doubt on its value for retailers, said Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“There was a lot of anticipation that Facebook would turn into a new destination, a store, a place where people would shop,” Mulpuru said in a telephone interview. “But it was like trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar.”
A year ago, investors hailed so-called F-commerce as the next big thing, speculating that the company had potential to threaten Amazon.com and PayPal. Facebook is the most-visited website in the world. Some people thought that persuading visitors to shop would be easy, Mulpuru said.
David Fisch, Facebook’s director of business development, said in June that the site would make shopping online, previously a solitary experience, more social.
Hanging out
“This is where people are hanging out,” Fisch said at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition in San Diego.
Facebook planned to profit from retailers buying ads to drive traffic to their on-site stores. Business consultant Booz & Co. predicted in January 2011 that physical goods sold through social commerce would balloon to $US30 billion from $US5 billion by 2015, with Facebook contributing a majority of sales.
Even as some businesses shut storefronts, many companies continue to devote advertising dollars to the social network. Facebook’s sales surged 55 per cent to $US1.13 billion in the fourth quarter. The company aims to use e-commerce more as a way of getting users to stay longer than as a way to boost revenue, said Krista Garcia, an analyst at EMarketer in New York.
Chris Kraeuter, a Facebook spokesman, declined to comment.
Customers had no incentive to shop at Gamestop’s Facebook store rather than the company’s regular website because purchasing online is already convenient, said Ashley Sheetz, who is the Grapevine, Texas-based company’s vice president of marketing and strategy.
Shut quickly
“We just didn’t get the return on investment we needed from the Facebook market, so we shut it down pretty quickly,” Sheetz said in a telephone interview. “For us, it’s been a way we communicate with customers on deals, not a place to sell.”
Gap, which has 5.6 million Facebook fans from its namesake, Banana Republic and Old Navy pages, opened and discontinued a storefront last year, said Liz Nunan, a company spokeswoman. The San Francisco-based company also discovered customers preferred shopping on its own sites, she said.
“We will continue to evaluate if this is something we want to bring back in the future,” Nunan said in an emailed statement.
Nordstrom tested ways to make shopping “seamless through Facebook” and decided on a broader social media focus, Colin Johnson, a spokesman, said.
JC Penney featured assortments in a Facebook “shop” tab beginning in 2010, and took it down in December 2011, Kate Coultas, a spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.
Other advertisers, such as Procter & Gamble, have kept their F-stores running, including Olay, Tide and Cover Girl.
An Australian online business, however, had a re-think about selling its goods through a Facebook store, after considering the costs.
Eugene Tan, director of Aquabumps, a business selling daily photographs of Bondi and other beaches, has a meaningful fan page on Facebook but declined the offer to create a new e-commerce engine or merge his current one on the social network.
“I had a look at some of the guys providing the service to create a shop and I thought (the site) was slow. A lot of apps that run on Facebook are slow. And I can’t control it. I’d rather people come to me (from Facebook).”
Tan said he also didn’t like to put a “hard sell” on his Facebook page. “We’re very subtle on the sell. My buyers would switch off.”
Tan stores about 1000 images on his site and offers 12 permutations in framing and sizing options.
“It’d be very difficult to have two stores, and expensive too. They (third party) wanted a monthly fee and a percentage of sales. With my own site I can control the costs – I paid a one-off fee to create it and pay the credit card transaction fees; that’s nothing,” Tan said.
Cracks in model
Wade Gerten, chief executive officer of social media developer 8thBridge, previously known as Alvenda, opened a Facebook store for the florist 1-800-FLOWERS. Minneapolis-based Gerten went on to develop commerce strategies for Delta Air Lines, Diane Von Furstenberg Studio and denim-maker Seven for all Mankind.
Cracks in the model showed quickly, Gerten said in a telephone interview. Clients “have taken a different approach,” shutting stores or scaling back their offerings.
“It was basically just another place to shop for all the stuff already available on the retailer websites,” Gerten said. “I give so-called F-commerce an ‘F’.”
Subscribe to our free mailing list and always be the first to receive the latest news and updates.