The story of E-Commerce over Facebook has been a mixed bag at best. The industry has gone through the full cycle of hype and disappointment at lack of results within the last year. When NextWidgets first launched Facebook storefront solutions in 2010, we felt that there was potential, but that placing a store on a tab inside a Fanpage was just not visible enough to consumers to deliver actual results. We quickly learned that, logically, Facebook users will visit a Fanpage far more rarely than they would interact with Fanpage content posted through the News Feed. With this insight in mind, we set about to create a system whereby we could allow merchants to post dynamic product related widgets directly into their Fanpage News Feeds as status update messages and thus allow fans to see and interact with these widgets directly within the Home screen.
Today, this product, named NextPromote, was launched by one of our favourite clients, Kelly Wearstler, a leading fashion and interior design brand based out of Los Angeles, through their Fanpage Wall. The results on this first post immediately surpassed anything we have seen from a tab based Fanpage store. Along with NextShare, our social recommendation product, we feel that this is the future of e-commerce on Facebook as it provides a rich, interesting and engaging experience for users as well as real results for merchants.