X Commerce and Facebook Team Up Just In Time for the Holiday Season
Magento made some exciting announcements last week at their X.commerce Innovate Conference in San Francisco. Over the two day conference, so many new and exciting announcements were made about creating “a seamless/frictionless shopping experience” to make any developer or online retailer to go nuts. Instead of listing out ALL of them, I am just going to focus on one, the announcement that gets me the most excited especially with the holidays right around the corner – x commerce’s integration with Facebook’s new open graph functionality.
Instead of the overdone and overused LIKE button, Facebook is giving shopper’s a more specific and personalized voice when they decide to ‘like’ anything on Facebook.
Apps developed via the X platform bring a unique blend to social networks and ecommerce. The open graph functionality gives shoppers the option to not only like an item, but rather distinguish if they ‘want’ or ‘own’ an item – pretty powerful information. Think about it, these are two key features in the ecommerce world – you get to know what people already have and what they want to purchase.
The “own” button is not only an opportunity to show off your latest purchase, but you are now able to tell people what you purchase, making you the instant go-to person on recommending (or not recommending) a particular product.
The “want” button is exactly what it sounds like… your social network on Facebook will know what products are on your “to buy” list. I see this rivaling Amazon’s wish list (one of my all time favorite services by Amazon).
The open graph could be a big deal for online merchants and I am glad to see Magento quickly grabbing ahold of it. This integration will allow Magento developers to help build Zuckerberg’s frictionless social shopping empire. The next few months over the holiday season will be a good indicator to see if this new functionality takes off or is a quick flop.
