In the ongoing battle for web supremacy, shopping—and particularly mobile shopping—is looking more and more like the front lines. Facebook’s announcement that it will host a new shopping section on its platform and in its mobile app is the latest salvo in that battle, and the social network is well-positioned to compete against Amazon, Google, and the other social networks.
Facebook claims that half of its almost 1.5 billion monthly users seek out products using its platform, and 1.31 billion users access Facebook via mobile. So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that the company is rolling out two initiatives to make it easier for users to shop from their smartphones.
First, an update to Facebook’s Canvas will enable advertisers to display fast-loading, Facebook-hosted pages of selected products after clicking an ad. And new “Shopping” sections on the Facebook site and app will curate advertisers’ products in a single place alongside its familiar News Feeds, Pages, and Groups.
Both formats promise to speed discovery and purchase via mobile. “Across each of these formats, our goal is to make it easier for people to discover relevant products on mobile while also driving results for businesses,” a blog post announcing the initiatives says.
Speed sells
Both enhancements could help increase sales by hosting shopping at Facebook, eliminating the downtime needed to click through and load another page on the wider web. These few seconds can be a conversion-killer, Facebook says, and especially on mobile devices, where a native-app experience offers an edge.
“The mobile shopping experience is often difficult to navigate,” Facebook’s post says. “Customers can experience slow load times and too many steps on the way to checkout. This is bad for people, and bad for marketers.”
Research seems to confirm that people prefer to buy from faster-loading desktop sites whenever possible, and a recent Demandware survey says that mobile makes up half of all e-commerce traffic. With e-commerce expected to reach $1.67 trillion in sales this year, according to eMarketer estimates, mobile sales account for just 31% of sales.
“In many cases, Facebook’s mobile store is going to be faster [and] more familiar to customers in terms of the experience, and I think there are some benefits to that,” Kevin Eichelberger, CEO of South Carolina-based e-commerce agency Blue Acorn, recently told Silicon Beat.
Sharing economy
Canvas and the Shopping section will benefit from Facebook’s considerable trove of consumer data and targeting tools. The items displayed are instantly shareable, making the suggestions and implicit endorsements of contacts a crucial part of product discovery. The platform will present items based on contextual advertising, users likes, and their friends’ likes.
More importantly, if Facebook is successful in spurring browsing and shopping, many users will never have to leave the platform—and brands will contribute even more to its coffers in search of buyers. Mobile ads accounted for 76% of Facebook’s $3.8 billion in advertising revenues last year.
'Where the customers are'
The social network has a dominant presence in mobile, where search giant Google has struggled to maintain relevance. Facebook’s app is the No. 1 download in the United States, comScore says, with smartphone penetration of 69%. What’s more, the app accounts for 10% of all time spent on smartphones, Forrester Research says.
Facebook partnered with Shopify to introduce Canvas earlier in the year, and its commerce partners will populate the Shopping section during rollout. “Our goal is to make it easy to sell products where the customers are,” Shopify’s director of product, Satish Kanwar, told Wired last month. “And increasingly, that’s on mobile.”
The new mobile shopping functions could also cut into Amazon’s growing edge in product search. Some 44% of online shoppers now skip search and go directly to Amazon when looking for specific items, according to BloomReach, up from 30% in 2012. And while Google has recalibrated to emphasize mobile, search can indeed be cumbersome on small screens.
“It’s Amazon vs. Google vs. Facebook,” Mega Group’s Carl Boutet told Silicon Beat. Facebook wants “to be in people’s lives from A to Z, and shopping is a big part of that. Obviously, there is some money to be made in doing that. They’re just trying to figure out what’s the best way for them to be a part of that equation.”
