The last couple of weeks have seen a slew of social commerce news hit the wires, much with a real the-future-of-social-commerce-is-personalised-recommendations theme. It can be tough keeping up with the fast-moving social commerce sector, so here’s a quick digest of what you need to know;
- Ebay buys Hunch, a recommender app that does product recommendations based on a shared ‘Taste Graph’ for $80m
- French multinational PPR (Gucci, Stella McCartney, YSL, Puma) invest $10m in social shopping app The Fancy, a Twitter-Tumblr for shoppers
- PayPal launches ‘Send Money’ Facebook app for sending money to friends via Facebook
- Facebook purchases check-in app Gowalla to boost location-based services
- Social commerce rewards-for-recommendations app Wikets gets $1.5m in funding
- Julien Chaumond, author of the first book on Social Commerce teams up with online Euro retailer Pixmania to launch social commerce gifting app on Facebook, Giftmania (gift idea recommendations based on Facebook data)
- Washington Post focuses on the rise of a new generation of social commerce gifting apps that make personalised gift suggestions based on Facebook data (Givvy, Let’s Gift It, GiftSimple and Wrapp)
- Hip UK t-shirt store TruffleShuffle launches a social commerce gifting app on on Facebook that makes personalised gift suggestions based on the recipient’s Facebook data, using Social Innovations’ SiiP platform
- ReadWriteWeb takes a swipe at social commerce: ‘Give up Facebook, social commerce will never catch on’
- Adweek suggests the time is right for social commerce to takeoff with a new generation of players that combine curation, personalisation and social sharing (OpenSky, Fab, Gilt, Pinterest, Svpply and Polyvore)
- Facebook apps to become available on mobile, as Facebook page management platform Vitrue announces workaround for displaying Facebook page tabs on mobile handsets
- UK Fashion retailer Warehouse launches a Facebook fan-store
- Luxury fashion designer Tory Burch makes the case for Facebook fan-stores in luxury as an outlet that can be leveraged to help marketers learn about their fans and reward them
- Facebook commerce platform Zibaba launches Facebook Ads Direct, an integrated Facebook advertising tool for promoting Facebook fan-stores
- F-commerce grows 8.8% in the last 4 months – 12% “encouraged to make a purchase from a Facebook store” according to UK eCustomerServiceIndex (eCSI)
- Boston Consulting Group publish report on social commerce opportunity in China; 40% of Chinese consumers read and post online user reviews – twice as many as the US, plus Taobao culture means that there is a big social commerce opportunity in China
- Sociable Labs publishes analytics data showing that 50.8% of shoppers are logged onto Facebook whilst visiting e-commerce sites
- BDO Compass CMO survey finds CMOs warm to social media promotions – seen as a top sales tool by 18% of CMOs (up from 10% last year) – still lags behind free shipping (23%) email promotions (28%) and search engine marketing (23%)
- Language-learning software company Rosetta Stone launches Facebook store, with realtime customer service
