Facebook and eBay together to a new era of social shopping

Last week in San Francisco was held Innovate, a new eBay developer conference, where the CEO of the better known online trading platform, John Donahoe, has announced an imminent breakthrough for the company, a turning point, as told TechCrunch (see also Facebook and eBay Team Up To Breathe New Life Into Social Commerce) in the next 3 years will lead to a major change in the way consumers buy and pay online. During the conference, in fact, X was launched Commerce, a new platform that, in addition to eBay, PayPal will combine well, Magento and GSI. The objective of X. Commerce is ambitious: to create an ecommerce solution is open, which aims to become the leading social commerce service.

X. Commerce seems to be the first real attempt to create an eBay business that is really aimed at developers, who now will have it in one space with all the technology to create "new e-commerce and shopping experiences based on a set of tools integrated with each other. "

Innovate was always announced a partnership between Facebook and eBay, which will see the integration of Open Graph of Facebook (the tree of connections that can share content and interact with friends) with GSI Commerce platforms and Magento . This will give developers the ability to build new shopping experiences for consumers and retailers, share ideas, create custom apps to buy, sell and share on Facebook.

The truth is that we can not say that social commerce has taken hold that much last year among consumers. It 'true that the dealers had the opportunity to sell through their brand page on Facebook, but so far sales on social networks have made great numbers. Consumers, moreover, were not particularly won over by shopping on Facebook probably due to their reluctance in purchasing through a platform originally used to share pictures and links. The concern that Facebook took possession of their sensitive data, such as those on credit cards, is the main obstacle to make one on a quick shopping "compulsive" aggregators such as portals of discounts and coupons.

As pointed out by the VP and General Manager Matthew Mengerink Commerce X. "Online shopping is a very individualistic and solitary. But shopping in itself is a social activity, and this opens up endless possibilities for social commerce. "

With the new integration between eBay and Facebook, developers will now be able to build social commerce app that will allow users to share what products they buy, or who wish to recommend.

Mengerink explains that what the new partnership is trying to encourage is the experience of pre-shopping. The process by which our friends choose a store and generates a product online conversation and sharing of ideas and opinions. And all this is a way to encourage brand recognition, to increase familiarity with the products through word of mouth, and it is essential to transform the online shopping experience more social and, therefore, more similar to traditional shopping.

No doubt the word of mouth and friends' opinions about a product has a lot of weight on the decision to purchase by a consumer, particularly in this "webcentrica". The basic question, however, is whether in the surf profile and see some friends discussing a product they just bought is actually a way to make the online shopping experience more social and, especially, if these news are really able to revolutionize the social commerce.

While waiting for the partnership to become concrete, what do you think?