We’ve been cooking up some great new features for a little October fun and I want to talk a little about the one I’m most excited about. We are integrating with a little known, off-the-beaten-path site called Facebook. Since we doubt you have heard of them, you may ask, what are these AmeriCommerce people thinking? We primarily will be adding a lot of value to their fledgling system by providing a smooth native shopping experience housed within their site walls that gives automatic access to your entire AmeriCommerce catalog and gives the flexibility in design that you have come to rely on with our ecommerce software. At least part of that statement was no joke, the rest was sarcasm, so hopefully Mark won’t take offense!
We all know Facebook has precisely 8 bigillion visitors an hour based on my research and we as store owners need to tap into that market to leverage the connections being made, to walk a tree of friends to millions of prospective customers. This primarily starts with a good social commerce strategy, which hinges on two things, open and frequent communication with visitors and quick access to what you’re selling. The best is when they merge and things go viral due to reposting and recommending through their network of friends.
We asked ourselves, how we can best empower our customers to sell more stuff through this blossoming ecommerce channel and the obvious thing came up, first let’s build a Ecommerce Shopping application for Facebook that can be placed on a business Facebook page. But we wanted to do it in a way that was comfortable for our users and with no compromises in AmeriCommerce functionality. All of our feature depth had to translate…and we wanted to give control of the look of this tab to our users, not lock them into a mostly fixed look like other people doing shop tabs currently.
Here are some highlights of our labor, available in 2010.6+ versions of AmeriCommerce!
- Feeds right from your AmeriCommerce catalog, no additional data entry
- Almost all features of AmeriCommerce at your fingertips.
- Customizable shopping tab, can look any way you want it to.
- Free Facebook themed default look rendered in HTML 5
- Full carting support right inside of Facebook
- Catalog search capabilities
- Custom Theming and Layout support
- Custom pricing, shipping and discount rules
We are working with customers to get this in place on their sites now and, when needed, doing social commerce consulting with them to fine tune it to each business. As 2010.6 matures and going into 2010.7, this is still our primary focus and we will be adding some great new features to enhance this new sales channel such as better ‘like’ support, commenting, sharing, sales to your friends, friend specific pricing and more. We are also eagerly awaiting a new Facebook feature they are providing AmeriCommerce that will allow us to fully implement more of their framework. This is all coming out in the next month through incremental releases of AmeriCommerce.
Thoughts?
What do you think? Where would you like to improve the Facebook experience outlined here? What would you like to do on Facebook? | 
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