Can social media become e-commerce platforms?
Facebook is moving forward step by step to enter the market of eCommerce. Earlier this year, it announced that users can send money to friends via Messenger. Literally, Facebook is turning Messenger to become a digital wallet. Now, Messenger partners with Uber to let people hailing rides within its app. Facebook has been testing on “Buy button” or “ shop section” on its Pages. Powered by its own digital wallet, Facebook can turn existing Pages into an enormous marketplace. Twitter and Pinterest are also heading this direction to further monetize their businesses.
Social media are called as media because they are channels of delivering or receiving information. Facebook has been very successful in connecting people. People now are used to share photos on Facebook rather than printing out actual photos, read newspapers on Facebook rather than read actual newspapers and communicating with friends on Facebook rather than meeting them. Facebook enables people to do so many things, but most of them are a form of communication. E-commerce, however, is not a communication, but business activities which involve a series of shopping behaviors. It is crucial that how Facebook invent a brand new shopping experience or user experience on its existing ecosystem.
This could be one of the interface design reported by several media. Obviously, it would pop up on users’ news feed to drive impulse purchase. It would work only if the product is unique or discounted. For example, a familiar brand offering discounts on some well-known products can catch attention and drive sales on Facebook. I am convinced that it can trigger the interest of people, but, for regular products, they would probably buy on Amazon or other sites to compare prices and styles. In other words, the existing system is designed to display information and smoothen communications. When it is required to engage people for shopping, it has to address information search in the shopping behavior.
Engel, Blackwell and Kollat have developed in 1968 a model of consumer buying decision process in five steps: Problem/need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives to meet this need, purchase decision and post-purchase behavior. Facebook or other social media can provoke the need recognition. For most products, people would still need to go through stage 2 to 5. Therefore, social media have to develop a new interface to facilitate stage 2 to 5.
Currently, social media are optimized to search individuals and brands. In talking about products, it’s not just about what products and brands, but also functionalities, prices, styles and more categories to be filtered. It could be challenging to develop ecommerce on the existing systems and community. Having an additional button for ecommerce is meaningless. It has to be integrated into existing systems and user experience. The way social media heading is to offer additional values rather than additional functions. If the introduction of ecommerce reduces usability and user experience of existing service, it will be a path to the hell instead of the heaven.