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Retailers Must Embrace a Multifaceted Commerce Strategy

Lately everyone's talking about F-commerce and the need for retailers to set up shop within Facebook. Some retail marketers see Facebook commerce as valuable, others see it as time consuming and complicated. Either way, if you're a retailer, you must embrace F-commerce.

This is no fad -- more than 600 million people spend about 1,500 minutes each month on Facebook. In fact, if Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world.

So what?

A tried-and-true core retail strategy is to simply, "put stores where your target customers are." So odds are your customers are some of the 600 million people deeply engaged on Facebook.

57% of Facebook users "like" a company to learn specifically about specials and deals. (Merkle, "View from the Digital Inbox 2011," Feb 23, 2011.) These users are connected to, on average, over 60 pages or groups. Consumers are practically begging retailers to give them a seamless purchase experience on Facebook.

What's in it for my consumer and me?

A Facebook store allows consumers to interact with all of your company's products, while also creating a viral purchasing effect that can bring others to a point of purchase. Through "likes," sharing purchases posted on newsfeeds (with purchase options in post), location-based commerce and more, consumers will continue discovering and sharing as they engage on a deeper level with your products and brand. Since the average Facebook user has 130 friends, these discoveries could potentially gain more traction and further reach than some advertising campaigns.

The F-Commerce experience can be and should be as seamless as possible for the consumer. If you're going to embrace F-Commerce, consumers simply must be able to make their purchases without having to leave Facebook.

So what's next? Should I abandon my traditional ecommerce store? Retailers need to be present everywhere their target audience is spending time -- whether it be Facebook, a traditional E-commerce site, physical store location, across the Web, on a mobile device or anywhere in-between.

A multifaceted approach is key. F-commerce should be additive, not a means to replace commerce sites or locations that are still conducive to meeting your bottom line.

Enabling a creative, engaging and unobtrusive F-Commerce experience is easy to set up and maintain with the right partners in place. If retailers can make shopping within Facebook convenient, easy-to-navigate and in line with the users' typical social experience, then F-Commerce success will be imminent.

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