How to Sell Without Selling: eCommerce Applications & Facebook

In 2007 Facebook launched their developer platform, essentially allowing anyone with the spare time to create custom applications for the site and add a bit of their own personalities to the experience. Since then, the platform has evolved and expanded at a record pace with developers – both in the community and commercial – providing a near constant stream of new and exciting applications.

Many of these new applications are created by companies looking to seize the opportunity and extend their consumer base to the ever-expanding Facebook community. And thus begins the union between eCommerce and social networking.

Mixing business with pleasure

Unfortunately for many of these opportunistic companies, Facebook users are generally not very receptive to what might be considered a commercial invasion of their personal networking space. While these commercial applications tend to be fun and quirky, site users have not been very eager to take advantage of them – likely because the business of eCommerce conflicts with Facebook’s fundamental use: relaxation and social interaction. Users feel as if they are being exploited as potential customers, rather than potential friends.

And so the question stands: Is it possible to fuse eCommerce with Facebook AND avoid alienation by Facebook’s core audience?

Giving the users what they want

Facebook had its beginning as an exclusive social networking site for college students, but opened their doors to all ages and countries in 2006; members now span all ages, interests, and backgrounds. That said, Facebook users are generally technologically savvy enough to use a computer and tend to value both their time (where they choose to spend it) and the quality of their interactions with others (their primary reason for visiting the site).

As Facebook grew, it quickly became a popular outlet for professionals – allowing them to find new contacts, maintain existing relationships, build their businesses, and widen the scope of their career field. It was this shift in Facebook’s core audience, from college students to professionals, that really got the ball rolling on eCommerce integration with Facebook.

Knowing the identity of their users is exactly why “Virtual Gift Giving”, an early eCommerce program run exclusively by Facebook, was such a success – they finally found a way to combine spending in a way that directly supplemented a user’s social interactions. Because it was so successful, many real world businesses followed suit.

Go viral with it!

Along with knowing their audience, successful applications have had a few other things in common: they are often both extremely functional (strengthening the social connections between users), as well as entertaining. These characteristics are two of many “viral attributes,” or traits that make an application appealing to the both the user’s sense of enjoyment, as well as to their check book. These viral applications are not only something that people want to be associated with, but also something that people feel like they need to share with friends.

One innovative business, Blue Nile Fine Jewelry, found it most effective to use indirect sales methods when dealing with Facebook users. In their wish list application, they acknowledge that people don’t usually login to Facebook with their wallet in hand – so instead the application provides a way for people to share links to what they’d like to buy/receive with potential gifters and recipients. At the same time, the application helps to keep users informed about sales and products right there on their own profile page. The application is simple, yet highly visible and successful in boosting the long term return on investment.

How to sell without selling

And so it seems, the key to generating an effective eCommerce application on Facebook is not to line the sidebars with banners pointing to your storefront, but to instead let the user seek you out when you have what they are looking for. Facebook users are constantly spammed with traditional internet advertising so the less that companies provide them with shameless promotions, the more valuable their product will be in the eyes of the user.

Once the users have found you, you just have to ensure that you’re providing them with useful content worth sharing. Good content and applications will benefit both parties when shared or placed on a user page, since the user must have strong motivation to advertise the company for free.

Indirect sales or mind control?

At this point in the game, perhaps the best method of eCommerce on Facebook is indirect sales – not asking the user to make an outright purchase, but still ingraining the product in their mind through continued, meaningful interactions with the application – subtly priming them for a future purchase.

Have you had any success implementing an eCommerce strategy with Facebook? We’d love to hear about it in the comments!

Editor’s Note: We’re very pleased to welcome our newest guest blogger, Katherine Naszradi. Katherine is currently a senior at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, pursuing a career in marketing. She’s had extensive experience building social media campaigns and online brand identities through sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. In her spare time she can be found traversing the Twittersphere as @krnasz, creating abstract works of art, and running with the bulls in Spain. Thanks Katherine, for a great post!