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Topman Store Opening in Chicago and on Facebook [Screenshot / Video]

So British fashion retailer Topman (part of Arcadia‘s Topshop) is opening today in Chicago, and is also opening up shop on Facebook with a fan store powered by Zibaba (also behind the recent pop-up Facebook fan-store for Marks & Spencer). Initially, the fan-store is a rather timid affair, limited to a storefront catalogue linking to Topman’s e-commerce site. But the Zibaba app does let customers like, comment – or ask friends for advice (although the advice button led us mistakenly to think we’d be hooked up with a sales advisor).

Catalogue apps such as these are a nice first step into social commerce for brands and retailers into social commerce, especially those looking to avoid the hassle of creating a new retail channel. Nevertheless we hope Topman will soon be offering fan-specials on its fan-store (linking – if necessary – to fan-only pages on their e-commerce site) – to give their fan-store a compelling reason to exist.  Integrating the Topman e-commerce site with Facebook would facilitate things here.

Zibaba certainly ‘get’ social commerce – and their Facebook app plays nice with eBay’s popular opensource-ish e-commerce software Magento.  The Tel Aviv outfit, also in New York and London has just produced a nice introductory video “Facebook commerce in a nutshell‘ embedded below.

Written by
Dr Paul Marsden
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4 comments
  • Just wondered if anyone has evidence of Facebook working in terms of donations or purchases as part of a cause marketing campaign?

  • The concept of having a store on social network has becoming more and more popular. One can get very good traffic out of the social medias.

  • At One iota (Mobile & Social Commerce solutions providers) we believe that simply implementing a product catalogue in Facebook will not suffice. Consumers will rather go to a brand’s website and browse/purchase here. What fCommerce is good at, with the right tools, is pushing products in to the news streams of their fans, visible to their friends too. We have developed a range of CMS tools that support our fully transactional (within Facebook) Facebook commerce solution (check out Footasylum or Republic for a non transactional store). These solutions also utilise the ‘Like’ ‘Send’ buttons.

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Digital wellbeing covers the latest scientific research on the impact of digital technology on human wellbeing. Curated by psychologist Dr. Paul Marsden (@marsattacks). Sponsored by WPP agency SYZYGY.