Facebook could be gearing up for a future heavily based around e-commerce, facebookkit.com reports.
After a disastrous IPO, pressure has been placed on Facebook to begin monetising the service for those shareholders who have seen their investments take a tumble. Now, in light of recent events, forecasters have suggested that the long-suspected “F-commerce” could be just around the corner.
Facebook has a user base of over 900 million users, with the figure growing daily. Compared to Amazon (160 million users) and eBay (100 million), the total is favourable for businesses looking to target as large an audience as possible. This has prompted speculation for many years that the Silicon Valley company will look to implement “shop front” pages to its site so members can actively sell products as opposed to use it to gather audiences via their social media content and interactions.
Recent figures from Gartner suggested that 50 per cent of all sales by 2015 will have come from a social media presence and mobile applications. Furthermore, Facebook users that were recommended a product by their connections were also shown to be more likely to go on to make a purchase themselves.
“With the draw of such large audiences and the wealth of opinion exchanged about products, Facebook presents a highly tempting channel for retailers,” CEO of Venda Eric Abensur told telegraph.co.uk.
“Therefore we believe Facebook can become a formidable recommendation engine driving consumers to buy products.”