Where there’s people, there’s bound to be shops
Facebook is no exception with 540 million people using it. That’s 540 million potential customers for the retailers[1]. There are quite a few shops already on Facebook but this morning the first major retailer announced the launch of their Facebook shop that supports purchases directly within its Fan page. This company is of course one of the biggest American retailers, J.C. Penney. The Texas based company operates over 1,100 stores in US and Puerto Rico; and now they have their own JCPenney Facebook Shop as well.
As people (read: consumers) spend more and more time online, especially on Facebook, it was a clever marketing decision for JCPenny to open up their Facebook store just before Christmas. As the JCPenny Facebook Page has close to 1.4 million fans, it makes quite an attractive bunch of clients to the company.
What makes their Facebook shop special is that you don’t have to surf away from Facebook in order to make a purchase. This is a critical feature that will most definitely increase sales. JCPenney Facebook fans can now perform all the usual e-commerce transactions without leaving Facebook including add to cart, checkout, removing or editing products in cart, specify shipping address and most importantly, pay with their credit card.
“By introducing e-commerce capabilities right on our Facebook Page, we can now provide more convenient features to our fans. This encourages social integration and user contribution” says Tom Nealon, JCPenney Executive Vice President. What this means is that, as the most important factor when making purchase decisions is peer recommendations, and when they are done on the Facebook Wall it is very easy to continue making the related purchases right there on the Facebook Shop.
You can find the JCPenney Facebook Shop here: www.facebook.com/jcpenney Click the Shop-tab to enter the store.
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[1] There are over 750 million Facebook users to date (8.8.2011).
Kris Olin, MSc (Econ.) * Editor in Chief at Social Media Revolver * Web Designer * SEO Specialist * Author of the Facebook Advertising Guide. Follow Kris on Twitter and LinkedIn. See his photos at Flickr.
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