Chile Monster provides New Mexico Chile products for, as they say, “For the Chile MONSTER in all of us!”
What’s interesting is their site, www.chilemonster.com, directs customers to buy the products on their Facebook shop. Unlike many brands that have awareness and interaction pages in Facebook and their e-commerce and shopping cart on their website, this brand has all their e-commerce in Facebook.
When you click on the website button, Shop Now, it takes you to the Facebook Store and provides special prices for customer’s that “Like” the brand.
If you click on “How to Shop” that provides you with various way s to get the products, including chile products on their Facebook store and the merchandise through zazzle.com
If you click on the SHOP CHILE MONSTER, it takes you to this page where there is a Groupon deal and many other products.
The customer picks the chiles they are interested in and that page posts. It contains more information about the product, the price, buttons to share the product and price with a customer’s social network, and a buy button.
Once the customer hits the buy button, they are taken to a secure check out page:
If a customer wants to purchase merchandise with the Chile Monster logo, they can click on LOGO MERCHANDISE STORE on the main Facebook page:
The customer clicks on the product, say the hat, and that leads the customer to the zazzle storefront for Chile Monster:
Related articles:
- Intuit Now Allows Businesses To Create E-Commerce Storefronts On Facebook (techcrunch.com)
- 2012 The Year Social Commerce Will Blow Up (business2community.com)
- Could Shopping in Social Networks Ruin Them? DrNatalie ‘s New Book: “Like My Stuff” How To Monetize Your Facebook Fans (newnewdrnatalienews.mystagingwebsite.com)
- Venpop Makes a Case Against Adding Shopping Carts on Facebook (allthingsd.com)
- Is the future of social commerce on Facebook? (gigaom.com)
- 3 Ways Taste Graphs will Fuel Social Commerce in 2012 (mashable.com)
Nice post!:)
There’s no doubt that F-commerce is the next step in the e-Commerce evolution.
We at StoreYa, see the daily growth in merchants on a daily basis.
Mia! thanks for commenting!
So you see Magento’s customers with an ecommerce store on their website convert /add it to Facebook and your fans into paying customers and increase your shop’s sales by marketing through Facebook?
What do you think is the biggest stumbling block to make that happen? They don’t know they can do that or they don’t know how?
@drnatalie
Excellent article, Dr. Natalie. Very nicely written with screenshots too – very helpful in illustrating the concept. We are part of the F-Commerce wave too, from a company dedicated towards enabling Small and Medium business find their voice and independence online, esp. from Big Box retailers encroaching on their business; and without having to resort to deep discounts via daily deals that while temporarily influences sales, does not help in building long term loyalty.
The interface we have built is similar to what chilemonster is using, except that we have made the basic store free for a limited period of time. We are also enabling Magento users to link directly to their ecommerce websites from Facebook as well. In fact, it could be for any existing ecommerce site.
Thank you for the article, and keep up the good work!
Hi there! Thanks, I am glad the post hit home. Love to learn more about your solution! Get a demo — see how easy it is to set-up as well as porting the ecommerce solution to a Facebook store! Here’s the book I just finished on Facebook commerce: http://www.amazon.com/Like-My-Stuff-Products-ebook/dp/B005Y23KLK/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319582513&sr=1-3 Love to know what you think! @drnatalie
Good point – will do ! Thanks for the link – I will check it out for sure !
Thanks, @dimenzen
Nice Article Dr Nat, at Vendorshop we are seeing huge potential for small businesses to do great things in f-commerce and we believe this is the way forward as the predicted figures show. Its great to see a company doing well on Facebook & receiving the recognition they deserve thanks for the post.
Hi Keith!
Thanks for reading the post and for your comments!I was very excited to see how easy it is to have a Facebook store and how much it is helping small businesses! It really is amazing! Love to take a look at your solution. I have a friend who has a restaurant. She wants to be able to have clients make reservations on Facebook. Can your app do that? Or do you know of one that could help with that?
Again, great to hear from you!
@drnatalie
i read your article with interest, although Im outstanded that no one including Chile monster themselves has noticed that their landing page on Facebook is provided by wix, and that anyone using an ipad or iphone will get a blank screen not the flash intro they are meant to see!
I used wix to create a Facebook store, my entire store fitted nicely into Facebook, and i thought this would prove to be one step ahead of my competition. However, the fact that iphone answer ipad users couldn’t see the store has prompted me to look elsewhere as i am losing out on hundreds of potential customers!
I shall be exploring the Chile Facebook page to see what alternatives they have used. At the moment the only work around is to provide a mobile site from wix, that hopefully encourages potential customers to log on from a pc.
I’ll keep you posted….
Should anyone wish to see my page its…
The website is http://www.glamkit.co.uk
Facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/pages/GlamKit/191420097617554
Just wanted to add…that everything today seems to be about using your mobile phone or tablet..yet by using any form of app on your phone for facebook will not show you any store links, page, landing tabs and so on…which renders all your efforts pretty useless. The only work around is by accessing Facebook via your phone/tab browser
Have i missed something?…
Wow~we had no idea this was written. Appreciate being used as a positive example. Thank you!
Ah! I am glad that you liked it! Very amazing stuff you all are doing! I will send you a copy of the book! Whats the best email to reach you at?
@drnatalie
Hey there! Thanks for the comments! Appreciate that!! I listed a bunch of vendors that provide Facebook in app stores… those include:
Love to hear your thoughts on which ones you have tried and had good success with!
@drnatalie
How to Display a F-commerce Store on Facebook
To display a f-commerce page in Facebook, there are two options. A brand can use iFrames or a Facebook app.
iFrames
With iFrames, a brand can create, host and display its own content in Facebook page in the middle column. The advantage to iFrames? The creation and maintenance of the content and site can be done in-house by the business itself. And it tends to offer the most seamless customer experience for consumers. As many of us have experience as customers ourselves, the ease of use and simplicity in the shopping experience is critical to engaging and retaining customers to follow through and not abandon their shopping cart.
Facebook Apps
• The other choice is to use Facebook apps. One of biggest advantage of using an app is the increased amount of space a brand has to show their content and merchandise. An app gives you 760 pixels but iFrames only allows 520 pixels. However, Facebook apps are complicated and do require a development team such as:
8thBridge
8thBridge allows brand to provide social shopping experiences that are portable, personalized and participatory. The experience across a merchant’s social shopping channel is consistent with the merchant’s existing website because 8thBridge leverages the merchant’s existing shopping cart, payment processing, and order fulfillment systems. This means there is little IT support required from a brand’s tech team. 8thBridge monetizes social media for some of the largest merchants in the world including 1-800-Flowers.com, Lands’ End, Delta Air Lines, Hallmark, HauteLook, and a division of Avon called mark.
SortPrice
With SortPrice’s free Merchant Store application for Facebook, merchants both big and small are running Facebook storefronts. The stores are powered by SortPrice technology combined with the product datafeeds. This allows the product information to be easily updated, so new products and price changes are synchronized. Each Facebook store application has an integrated Wishlist which allows Facebook users to save products and share them with friends. Over 1,500 small, medium and large brands have stores. Among them are OfficeDepot, PetSmart, Loews and Adobe.
Ecwid
Ecwid focus since 2001 has been commercial open source PHP shopping cart software. One good thing for small to midsized brands is that it’s also free. The software can be easily integrated to any existing site in minutes and the store can be mirrored on many sites at the same time and managed from one place. Because the store integrates with social networks, brands can run their own store on Facebook. No PHP knowledge is required, and there are no code changes or hosting expenses. Brand include Embe, K&K Photography Gallery, Hello Magpie, RedZero Printing, US21, Cafe Grumpy and Mammamiu!
Usablenet
With Usablenet’s integrated Facebook application, brands can offer any product, service, feature, and functionality currently available on your website within Facebook. Customers can purchase a product, book a reservation, pay a bill, review products and share them with their friends, or provide feedback – without leaving Facebook. Customers include ASOS and JCPenny.
BigCommerce
BigCommerce provides e-commerce software to online retailers and merchants. Brand that want to do business on Facebook can use the BigCommerce free application, SocialShop 2. The retail platform shows up as the “Shop Now” tab on the Facebook page. It allows customers to share products with their Facebook friends and buy products within Facebook. Examples are Southern Jewlz and BabyAndMeGifts.com and Etitude’s.
Storefront Social
This software enables retailers to connect their e-commerce store to Facebook. The brand can upload the storefront banner, choose from a wide variety of templates, feature/highlight products for special promotions, etc… After building the storefront, the connection wizard allows the brand to easily install the storefront to Facebook. Example brands that use this software are Livescribe and Zumba Fitness.
http://www.x.com/
If you sell on ebay, you’ll want to watch to pay close attention to this group of vendors. X.commerce is a group of trusted, global leaders in the commerce space—eBay, PayPal, Magento, GSI Commerce, and other best-of-breed partners that have come together to deliver the first end-to-end, multi-channel commerce technology platform with all the pieces, including e-commerce, marketing automation, mobile transactions and payments… In Robert Scoble’s video interview of the CEO of ebay, John Donahoe, explained that ebay is creating this app ecosystem so as well as be able to ask their Facebook friends if they should buy it.
For merchants X.commerce is a single platform that makes the most current commerce technologies easy to access and deploy. For developers X.commerce is a robust, open ecosystem that empowers integrators and innovators with the most complete set of commerce-related tools and capabilities in the world. Developer’s now have access to eBay Inc.’s resources through one entry point giving them access to hundreds of millions of consumers and merchants who are hungry for better end-to-end commerce experiences. There is a conference on X.commerce to learn more.
MagentoCommerce
Magento is particularly attractive to small to medium-sized businesses. Magento is an open source, ecommerce ecosystem. With Magento and x.commerce within a hour you can take a small physical retail store and build a online store website and a shopping cart, they can start selling. The great thing here is if you are a developer, there is the opportunity to make money if you can come up with the next social commerce killer app.
ebay
ebay merchants made $60B last year and only 45 percent was in the US. This means shopping has gone global. Twenty percent of the commerce is cross boarder. For ebay power sellers, eBay is betting that more and more people will be pulling their shopping experience into a social media context. They are building apps to empower ebay merchants. For instance if friends, who are shopping on ebay, can ask their social graph, “Should I buy this jacket or that jacket?” So ebay is connecting to a customer’s Facebook social graph via direction from Facebook executives like Katie Burke Mitic so with a post, customers can get their friends opinion and decide and buy.
And ebay is developing a visual search social mobile application. It can take a picture of a jacket you see in the store or that a friend is wearing and then search and find similar things for sale on ebay and then buy it. The ebay apps will put ebay merchants store content on iphones and ipads. They are partnering with geo-location companies, so that if ebay merchant had a store and a person saw something they liked on line, they could find the store location.
ebay also powers Facebook’s virtual currency system where customer’s can use Facbook credits to buy things on Facebook.
Payvment and PayPal’s Adaptive Payments API
Payvment may be a great choice for small to midsized businesses because it’s also free. Payvment originally was a web service that allowed a site owner to integrate a shopping cart into their e-commerce by adding one line of code to the site. The software allows retailers to create Facebook storefronts. Customers can use credit cards and PayPal. The new paid versions of the software include advanced analytics on Likes, comments and Tweets on a product-by-product basis. Example Facebook shops are CHiASSO, Amoeba Music, Molly Sims, Hooked on Phonics, AdultSwim UK, Gibson and Lakers Nation.
Zong
Mobile payment platforms is another category to consider. Choices for brands range from using Zong, Square, to Boku, to Mopay. Google Inc. and Intuit Inc are working on mobile payment platforms. The ability to pay on your mobile phone along with being able to access a Facebook store and/ or ask your Facebook social graph about products will provide an all-in-one social mobile Facebook commerce.
The adoption of smartphones, 3G/4G networks as well as the increase unlimited data plans has accelerated mobile media use. Brands are realizing that another venue to reach customers is through mobile browsers, apps and SMS. As technology advances, advertising will most likely play a major role in the development of the mobile ecosystem that Facebook users count on. In fact, according to comScore’s U.S. study on mobile advertising, they found that the number of advertisers using mobile display ad campaigns has more than doubled in the past two years.
In another study from comScore revealed that 6.7 million U.S. mobile subscribers used location-based “check-in” services on their phones in March 2011, representing 7.1 percent of the entire mobile population. Location-based apps allow brands to interact with customers by providing special deals and incentives in real-time on their mobile device.
The next trend will be brands that allow full f-commerce via smart phones. One often overlooked aspect is how often a product is forwarded to a friend or posted to Facebook, These actions are quite common within mobile applications, with 4-9 percent of users doing it regularly. Brands need to start thinking about how to reach their mobile audiences while they are shopping. Through Facebook Mobile texts consumers are able to receive notifications, and send and receive SMS.
An example of mobile payment is Zong. eBay just acquired Zong for $240 million. Zong’s customers are social gaming and virtual world companies, including Zynga Inc., IMVU Inc., Walt Disney Co.’s Playdom and Zwinky. Zong’s strong suit is its relationship with 250 mobile carriers around the world. These relationships enable users to charge ecommerce purchases to their mobile bill via Zong. Those partnerships give Zong access to 3.2 billion mobile users.
TheFind
Who has surpassed Yahoo and the second most popular shopping site? TheFind, according to comScore. TheFind’s mission is to help every shopper find exactly what they want to buy, and to help every merchant, large and small, to reach those shoppers. TheFind is a vertical search engine for shopping that puts every product, every store, every sale, coupon and discount, right at the customer’s fingertips. It provides an in-depth Facebook integration called “Shop Like Friends.” What that does is allows customers to sign into the site with Facebook Connect. It then taps into the preferences of their Facebook Friends and pages that their friends have “liked” on Facebook. It then it maps this to stores and brands.
ALUC-it
In addition to the platform to build a Facebook store on, brands need to start to look at the mobile platform that they want to build their shopping and interaction apps on. A smart thing to do is to consider one that is a customizable mobile application that can also connect to their CRM or Customer Service software. ALUC-it is one of the many choices. Brands that build on this platform can connect that mobile commerce platform to Genesys Customer Service /CRM Software.
One of the issues of social mobile shopping is the fear that if people are doing comparison shopping, say with an app like TheFind while in a store, they might leave. The compelling value proposition for ALUC-it: You keep customers IN THE STORE.
With this app they scan the product’s QR code, or image and the apps does some comparison shopping and offers a coupon or a special deal to prevent the customer from buying the product elsewhere. With respect to Facebook, the consumer can instantly find who in their network has bought that product and LIKE’s it, or thinks it sucks. They can also share questions with their friends, “So these shoes make my butt look big?”
The advantages of this mobile platform is to flexibly enable smartphone users to:
• Easily find information about a product and associated offers
• Personalize the purchasing experience
• Fast-track customer service interactions after purchase
• Provide a single point of integration for all product-related conversations.
With respect to retailers and manufacturers, it’s a mobile platform to flexibly enable to:
• Provide up-to-the minute personalized information about products and associated offers to customers who use their smartphones as connectivity devices
• Track customer purchasing habits and experience
• Increase efficiency in customer service interactions related to particular product
In the next chapter we’ll take a look at how f-commerce is different from e-commerce.
I read your case study on Chile Monster with interest … but was very surprised to see that you hadn’t listed VendorShop in your list of providers (given that VendorShop provides Chile Monster’s store). I have to confess to a vested interest in that I work for VendorShop Social. We power thousands of Facebook stores and Chile Monster is a great example of a business doing f-commerce really well.
Hi Chris! Sorry for the omission! Thanks for bringing that to my attention!