SortPrice.com Say Retailers Listing 60% More Products on Facebook

SortPrice, a shopping app that enables online retailers to deliver an e-commerce experience directly through Facebook has posted data that suggests that F-commerce is a trend that retailers are embracing.

SortPrice has built Facebook stores for more than 1,500 retailers and their commentary on their data says “2010 was the biggest year yet for the Store Application; there was more than $3.78 billion worth of merchandise on SortPrice-built Facebook storefronts throughout the year.”

Points of Interest:

• SortPrice merchants posted over 7.6 million products on their Facebook storefronts in 2010, 60 percent more total products than the 4.6 million in 2009.
• In 2010, there were approximately 53,000 different product categories on SortPrice-built Facebook storefronts and 28 different product industry categories.

2010’s Top Product Industry Categories (by total products, on storefronts managed by SortPrice)

2010’s Top Product Industry Categories (in dollars, on storefronts managed by SortPrice)

Overwhelming or Underwhelming?
We’re not really sure to be honest.

Critically what is missing from this dataset is how much product was actually sold – which would tell the story of whether customers are truly prepared to make store purchases within Facebook (We did follow up to ask for this data but it was not made available).

However the increase of product listings from the retailers themselves nonethless suggests confidence in the strategy.

And intuitively, the wishlist type features and the ability to like products directly within SortPrice Facebook storefronts do look useful, particularly around sports brands that have a huge real-world fanbase. I guess the question is, if you have more than 100k fans on Facebook, why wouldn’t you create a store?

Whilst there is not much substantial proof that Facebook shopping will take off in the same way as social gaming has, we are going to keep an eye on this trend.

It is probably one to bet on – 2010 unexpectedly saw a coming of age of display advertising as a complimentary tactic to search marketing – with ad impressions significantly increasing likelihood to purchase according to a study by iProspect.

So, with Facebook posting $1billion in revenue from it’s ‘display-like’ advertising platform, we can expect to hear about specific ‘F-commerce’ behaviors in the future.