You shouldn’t bother with creating a storefront on Facebook

Four major retailers have closed their storefronts on Facebook over the past year: Gap, J.C. Penny, Nordstrom and Gamestop. The reason? Fans have bought close to nothing.

Facebook shops close - no reason to be alarmed

Strange? Not really. Like I commented on this Simply Zesty blogpost, Facebook is a social thing. When you are in a pub talking, you are not in a shopping mood either. Facebook will never make it as an e-commerce platform, but that is not really a problem because instead it will be (and already is) an endorser which gets people to talk about and share things. And this rather than buy (right now right there).

On top, like it or not, nobody is visiting the pages itself because all the action is happening inside the newsfeed/ticker. That’s where you need to be present with your brand, not inside a tab on your Facebook page which only few people will visit anyhow once they ’liked’ your brand page. Where companies should put their efforts in is creating ways to do effectively datamine on the platform. But this needs some clever and constant communication and approaches which you can’t do via standalone tabs.

Lots of companies based on social commerce will not be able surviving on the long term due to this. Social commerce does not mean implanting your store on Facebook, it means socializing your store itself. Facebook commerces also need to understand that people are there to enjoy life, not spend money (except for gaming).