Retailers Shut Facebook Storefonts Amid Apathy

Re:Retailers Shut Facebook Storefonts Amid Apathy by Jare on Saturday February 18, 2012 @06:43PM (#3608085)

I never knew Facebook was trying to cover this segment of the web presence, but if I did, I would have imagined them forcing some kind of fee on storeowners like they do with mandatory credits for apps/games. Given that there were no apparent barriers like that for F-store operations, it's quite interesting to learn that people didn't use them. I can imagine three issues:

- buyers just didn't know about this.

- people want a more private experience when buying online. Not so much "trying to sell to people in a bar" as "people don't want to shop when it feels that everyone is looking".

- buyers are more and more using mobile, and Facebook is still trying to figure out how to integrate 3rd parties into their mobile experience.

Given the patterns of behaviour of Facebook users, I can't really believe any of the three, which leaves me confused.

Oh, and F-Commerce is a funny term.

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Re:Retailers Shut Facebook Storefonts Amid Apathy by kellishaver on Saturday February 18, 2012 @10:44PM (#3608587)

I'm not sure it's something Facebook is necessarily pushing. I think it's just businesses squeezing e-commerce pages into Facebook page tabs.

I think a lot of folks still don't notice the custom page tabs. They "like" something and they see the items that get dumped into their stream as a result or they occasionally go to the "wall" for that thing, and just don't see the links in the sidebar to the custom pages.

Even if the company sets it as the default tab for their page, once the user has "liked" the page, the default changes to the wall.

I think it's because Facebook isn't officially enabling and supporting e-commerce that it's not working out well.

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