Source: Mitchell Harper | Mashable
Facebook has extended their ubiquitous ‘Like’ button beyond its increasingly morphous boundaries to… well everywhere (we just got ours). Combined with Facebook Open Graph this has implications for all small business owners, but not the least of which are are ecommerce businesses. Mitchell Harper, whose BigCommerce software powers nearly 50,000 website shopping carts explains in Mashable the ways of impact now building, while the video we embedded hears NewsCertified Exchange COO Jim McManus describe this latest convergence, of Web and FB as essentially paradigmatic. -BJK
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5 Ways Facebook’s Open Graph Will Impact E-commerce
After watching Mark Zuckerberg’s recent keynote at the Facebook F8 developers conference, it is clear that Facebook is looking to become the standard in social personalization for everything you do online. And the new social features and direction that they announced will undoubtedly have an impact on the broader world of e-commerce.
For example, their new “Like” button is already visible on over 50,000 websites, and they’re providing an API-based way to access what they’re calling a user’s “Open Graph,” which is a list of everything he or she has “liked” across the entire web — music, books, restaurants, food and more.
The Facebook Standard
Now here’s the fun part: Using Facebook’s API, a website can take your interests and use them to personalize your browsing experience. Better still, they don’t even have to prompt you to login to your Facebook account, thanks to the new auto-authentication feature which already lets sites like Yelp, IMDb and Pandora pull in your Open Graph data.
Until a few weeks ago, it may have sounded crazy to think that Facebook would become the standard when it comes to website personalization. But as each day goes by, it’s looking like that’s exactly what will happen.
Although there’s been concern about privacy, in my opinion, personalization will end up boosting the online shopping experience for consumers, and will provide some powerful opportunities for savvy e-commerce companies.
What This Means for E-commerce
Here are my five predictions for how that will happen.
1. Amazon won’t be the only online store with sophisticated personalization. Considering anyone (with permission) can pull your Open Graph via Facebook’s API, this information can be used to personalize an online store based on your past purchases, likes, and preferences quite easily. For example, our company is already working on a way to personalize the “Featured Products” area on the home page of our merchant’s stores based on their visitor’s “likes” from Facebook.
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