More social commerce consolidation.
One of the big e-commerce solutions players – eBay’s GSI (Estee Lauder, Ralph Lauren, Levis, Sports Authority, NFL…) has teamed up with one of the leaders in social shopping software, 8thBridge (Elle, American Apparel, Ticketmaster…). Together the ‘dream team’ hopes to offer a one-stop shop for next generation e-commerce and marketing offering integrated social features and deep customer understanding.
GSI’s 500+ customers will now have a quick and easy solution to benefit from Facebook’s Open Graph, courtesy of 8thBridge’s “Graphite” software which enables Graph-powered logins, personalisation, ratings, rewards and analytics, allowing retailers to offer their own customers a rich social shopping experience.
We’re fans of Graph-powered e-commerce – partly for the social, personal and convenience features that the Open Graph can offer customers, but mostly because of the better customer understanding it offers retailers. We see the future of Facebook’s Graph more as part of Big Data than social media; to the degree that Graph data can help retailers better understand their customers (the personal data is as important as the social data), it will help them better address customer needs. And that is the essence of good business.
Expect more of this social commerce consolidation as social commerce ‘middleware’ gets integrated into e-commerce suites.
