Facebook: High Street or Department Store?
With 600 million members and companies starting to sell their products there, Facebook could potentially become the largest shopping space in the world. The remaining question being: what will be the role of this emerging F-commerce – Facebook Commerce – as brands develop their wider E-commerce strategy?
High street and department store, what’s the difference?
Some will say, a department store is nothing but a high street in one building, where the owner takes a certain percentage of the sold product for letting that definite space to a brand. Others will say it is all about curation and this is why people are willing to pay more expensive price tags: a pre-selection has already been made for them, making the shopping experience easier and less scary too. On a shopping avenue like Les Champs Elysées or Fifth Avenue, if you want to see the offering of each brand, you would have to enter in each store. And some stores with their reputation and expensive clothes seem unfriendly to the “just looking” policy. The department store solves this as it is all in one place, organised differently with “Jeans” areas offering several brands, allowing you to try them all at the same time. It also takes risks by featuring up-and-coming designers that you cannot find on high streets. And this curation process is key in the department store’s offering.
Facebook: the Internet’s main high street
The internet is a vast space and search engines (mainly Google) were our only path to find our way in the world wide web. If the internet is like one of these European cities with multiple and complicated small streets, Facebook has become the main gathering place. It is a point of reference for all: a place to connect and share. A London urban legend says that if you remain on Piccadilly Circus more than 37 minutes, you will cross someone you know. Remain on Facebook for 2 minutes and you will find a “friend” to talk to. And as a place where people discuss and share things, it has also become a starting point for many web journeys that would have previously begun on search engines.
Social networks are the discovery channel
Search engines are an easy way to “get to.” You know what you are looking for, you just do not know yet what website it can be found on. Search engines help you to find out, but they are a passage, not an end. Facebook has become both an end – people use it for its primary purpose: sharing photos, moods and jokes with friends – and a way to “get to”, a way to discover things, to explore thanks to the power of social recommendation.
Facebook: the modern department store
This is where Facebook makes a difference: brands, friends and other influential figures such as fashion bloggers are carrying the curation process. Thanks to suggestions you receive from friends or pages you have liked, you’re going to see many things you might like “under one roof” – but instead of that roof being a department store, it’s a website.
It is an evolving space that changes with your needs and your tastes, allowing you to reduce choices so that they fit you. It is a department store, adapted to you. The brands that will become successful using “F-commerce” will be those who understand the nature of this – that consumers want to be guided through the shopping experience, to receive recommendations from different sources while keeping the process of buying under one roof.
