This comes as quite a surprise for me, cause I personally think Payvment has first mover advantage in the field of social commerce. They had also raised in excess of USD 7 million in funding and is one of the featured facebook open graph partner. I expected them to stick around much longer.
Does it mean social commerce is over?
Let's do a quick reality check, I think most of you shop online, but how many of you actually bought something online by going through the whole checkout process inside facebook itself?As far as shopping for physical goods is concerned, I'm confident very few has actually done that, period. The main issue lies in humans' "State of Mind".
Many so called f-commerce is actually done via PM (Private Message), customers either commenting on a product post or sending messages back and forth checking on price, sizes, stock availability, payment methods etc and this whole process is very tedious.
Shopping is a "State of Mind"
Imagine in an offline world, we go restaurant for dining, we go barber to trim hair, we go stadium for sports entertainment, in any of these events, no one likes being sold to as we are NOT in the mental state of shopping!
Same goes for online world, we go to ebay to shop, airasia.com for airline tickets, and facebook to checkout friends & family photos and stay updated with gossips, but few actually are in a state of mind to buy things.
And it's notoriously hard trying to change the state of mind and status quo - eg when you logon to Airasia.com, your mind is all about getting cheap airline tickets!
This explains well why most airline or travel website are not yet transformed into successful etailers selling to you everything from A to Z even though tickets are most likely the first thing we as consumers actually buy online. (see chart below released by PayPal)
eCommerce on a Facebook Tab won't cut it
If you take a close look, early attempt at Facebook commerce is mostly about replicating an e-commerce website inside Facebook tab, this, so far has not been getting traction (sales).
Yet, don't count out f-commerce, it is still at its infancy, eventually some company (or Facebook itself) will find a model which will make f-commerce work. Speaking of such, Facebook is already experimenting with new ecommerce initiative such as Facebook gifts, which lets users make purchases for friends directly through facebook.
Also, new innovation on social commece is emerging at speed of light! Checkout this new collaboration by Twitter and Amex which actually you buy and pay via a hashtag #.
No matter how it will eventually work, you can be assured that it won't be just about duplicating an eCommerce website inside Facebook itself. That's why we didn't do that on webShaper and we decide to build only gorgeous looking design which sync the new arrival, best seller and featured products from the webstore. It smartly integrates social button like Facebook Like, Pin It, G+1 when you hover over the product images (pic below) to enable the merchants' customers easily share what they love inside facebook. If customers click on the products, it will lead directly to the merchant webStore to complete the whole shopping process without compromising the online shopping experience.
More reading:
Facebook Commerce Has Been A Big Flop
http://read.bi/11Mhm74
Intuit acquires payvment team, tech and patent
http://tcrn.ch/11O8IoB
