To sell on Facebook or not to sell: For many marketers, especially those with e-commerce sites, that is a vexing question.
Most merchants limit their Facebook sales efforts to including a link to their e-commerce site; a few, such as Kmart Design, have introduced sophisticated applications such as shop-by-video, which allows you to click directly on a video to learn more and ultimately purchase a featured product. Beehive Co-op has opted for another method: offering an ever-changing selection of its full merchandise range.
“I realize how important it is to keep the products front and center, whether it’s with the Facebook fan group or customers coming back to our site,” says Petra Geiger, who founded Beehive in 2004 as a retail shop in Atlanta selling apparel, home accessories, and gifts from small designers and “fledgling entrepreneurs.” Beehive has expanded to include a second store, in Mount Kisco, NY, and an e-commerce site that sells products from more than 200 designers.
“For Facebook I wanted something that was constantly changing,” Geiger continues. “There are so many people who spend so much time on Facebook. It’s a great outlet for those people to always have content in their own little world.”
For its Facebook page, Beehive uses the Our Stuff application from ShopVisible, whose software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution hosts and maintains the technology of Beehive’s e-commerce site. The application was introduced just this past February; Beehive, which rolled it out in May, is one of its first adopters.
The application pulls items at random from Beehive’s product range and automatically refreshes them so that each time a visitor returns to the Facebook page, he or she will see different merchandise. Geiger describes the software as “very technically easy,” which is important, as Beehive is a very small operation.
Geiger is also working on using Our Stuff to create some Facebook-specific giveaways. The difficulty here has nothing to do with the technology. Because Beehive is a business cooperative, the individual designers, not Geiger, are responsible for their own content and merchandise, including setting the prices and deciding if they want to discount or give away products. All the same, Geiger definitely thinks that Facebook is an ideal platform for running contests and promotions to help spread the word about the business and its offerings.
Sean Cook, CEO of ShopVisible, agrees. He recommends using brand Facebook pages to showcase unique products and channel-specific promotions, such as creating product bundles at a special price exclusively for Facebook followers. “It’s not that you’re discounting products exactly,” he says. “You’re creating a value-added product.”
A company could, of course, sell most if not all of its products on its Facebook page, just as it could build its own social network on its e-commerce site. But Cook believes that while an e-commerce site should offer some social features (Beehive, for instance, has a blog and customer reviews on its core Website) and a Facebook page should include a sales element, the two channels should not replicate each other.
“The only reason people connect with you in a social network is because they’re getting some kind of value out of the relationship,” he says. “If I wanted to find Beehive Co-op online I could go directly to their site. But if know there’s going to be unique product on the Facebook fan page I’m going to sign on there as well.”
To sell on Facebook or not to sell: For many marketers, especially those with e-commerce sites, that is a vexing question.
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